Referly is full of experts who are passionate about creating great experiences with the things they own.  Why buy something anyway, if not to put it to use in your life somehow?  We started Referly because we knew there had to be a better way to explore products without sifting through hundreds of different stores which are effectively walled gardens.

Buying “Things” to Create a Moment

The Referly team is constantly talking about consumption.  As 4 people (5 starting today!) who have never operated a shopping service before, we’ve always been more producer than consumer, and initially I struggled with the feeling that shopping was a vapid activity.  But when we talk to people who are shopping it is anything but empty – people are constantly trying to find ways to make meaning in life and the things they own are part of that.  Whether it is a gift for a baby shower, fishing gear for a weekend trip, groceries for a home cooked meal, a dress for a very special date – we put a lot of time and effort into buying these things because they’re part of an overall experience we want to create.

With this in mind, we’ve redesigned our front page of our website to focus squarely on collections – the grouping of products together to help facilitate an experience.  We hope this will make it easier for shoppers to discover things they want in a new way, and we’re very proud to present to you the best of the community going way beyond fashion to bring you unique snapshots of experiences you might want to try.

With thousands of collections to choose from we will be bringing new highlights to our homepage every few hours, and you will see the beginning of our ranking system start to emerge.

Getting Featured on the Front Page

We’re getting a lot of questions about how a collection is chosen to be featured on the front page.   Right now we are experimenting with an algorithm (pulling up the most data-rich collections) combined with hand curation (to make it beautiful) and we expect how we do this will continue to evolve.

The most important factors in getting featured are:

• Have a title, cover photo, and description
• Have at least 4 products with pictures (you can upload one if you don’t like the one we grab for you)
• Product descriptions that help tell the story

Our algorithm is looking for these attributes, but if you have something awesome that you are eager to see featured you can also email us at support (at) refer (dot) ly OR send a tweet to @Referly.