Polyvore
| Available in | English |
|---|---|
| Owner | Yahoo! (2015–present) |
| Website | polyvore |
| Alexa rank |
 1195 |
| Launched | February 1, 2007 |
Polyvore is a community-powered social commerce website headquartered in Silicon Valley, California. The company's virtual mood board function allows community members to add products into a shared product index, and use them to create image collages called "Sets". They can also browse other users' sets for inspiration, share sets with friends and interact with people through comments and likes. Due to the visual nature of the tool Polyvore is mostly used to build sets in the fields of home decoration, beauty and fashion. Online retailers, too, can upload their product images to Polyvore and link back to their product pages or use Polyvore to encourage users to showcase their products through such activities as board creation competitions. Polyvore opened an office in New York City in August 2012. At that point the company said it had amassed 17 million active users. By the end of 2012 the company said its site was receiving 20 million unique visitors per month, a number which continues to be used in 2016.
Polyvore was initially funded in three rounds by six investors, including initial investors Benchmark Capital and Harrison Metal, and Matrix Partners and DAG Ventures as lead investors in later rounds. It was acquired by Yahoo on July 31, 2015.
Polyvore started as a prototype developed by Pasha Sadri in August 2006. While he and his wife were decorating their new house, they found themselves cutting furniture ideas and color patches out of magazines and assembling them into inspiration boards. While this tried and tested approach worked, Sadri, an engineer at Yahoo, felt that it would be better if the mood boards could be created online. He used Yahoo Pipes, one of the tools he had created, as a basis to build the first iteration of Polyvore. Soon after its creation, fellow Yahoo engineers Jianing Hu and Guangwei Yuen joined Sadri to form the founding team, which launched of the first version of the website in 2007. Polyvore Inc. was formed in August of the same year. The company received US$2.5 million in series A funding from Benchmark and Harrison Metal in December 2007.
In August 2009, Polyvore reached four million unique visitors, 150 million pageviews a month, and received US$5.6 million in series B funding led by Matrix Partners, alongside previous investors Benchmark Capital and Harrison Metal Capital.
The New Yorker profiled Polyvore in March 2010, calling it a “fashion democracy” and a “world of virtual Anna Wintours”. At the time, Polyvore received 6.6 million unique visitors. An increase in inquiries from e-commerce companies led Polyvore to experiment with ways to monetise their users through such things as affiliate marketing and sponsored board creating competitions.
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