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Business Casual: Focus On Fashion Start-Ups



Kendall is a former fashion editor who has written for NYmag.com, Lucky, InStyle, and NBC. She recently scrapped that glamorous life and is pursuing an MBA at MIT Sloan, in hopes of becoming an entrepreneur.

I’m sitting on my couch, struggling to focus on how to begin writing. But, I can’t pick among any of the what-am-I-doing-here moments I’ve had recently to start with. To be blunt, my life lately has been crazytown. Meeting with one of Pinterest’s co-founders. Shaking hands with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Playing with robots at Intuitive Surgical. Touring Sequoia Capital’s office. Listening to Polyvore’s CEO. Though these experiences might appear varied and disconnected, one motif binds them all: entrepreneurship.

A driving force in my choice to go to business school was to learn more about entrepreneurship in the hopes that (gulp!) I could one day start my own venture. A quick and obvious counterpoint to this is: why go to b-school? Join a start-up! Get real on the ground experience! That’s great for some people. For me, I wanted an MBA. After all, I decided to go to b-school when Gilt Groupe rose to fame, and just as Rent the Runway and Birchbox were starting to–both of which were started by Harvard Business School women. While magazines were on the decline–losing advertisers, cutting staff–things were getting exciting in the start-up world.

Today, the lid’s been blown off. Almost every day I hear of a new idea promising to give us all online closets or let you crowdsource your shopping habits: Stylitics, TheFancy, ModeWalk, Fashism, Svpply. The space is so crowded now; it’ll be interesting to see which sites emerge on top. Any guesses?

Two sites that we can pretty much guarantee will stick around for a while are Polyvore and Pinterest. On my recent MIT Sloan Entrepreneurship trek, I had the complete pleasure to visit these offices. Here’s what I found:


Published on Friday, April 13th, 2012 at 3:31 PM

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