Are you still looking for *that* dress to go to a special event and can’t find it yet? Is everything you see in shops, in the wrong shape or colour or do you feel you could be a better designer yourself, though you don’t have the actual skills to make a dress? Well, don’t despair, but head for StyleShake’s London studio. When it was first launched the StyleShake website allowed its registered users to create through its “Design Studio” option to start creating their own dresses by choosing fabrics, colours and silhouettes, and then have it made by a team of professionals. The site, a brainchild of marketing professional Iris Ben-David who started it with the help of designer and Central St. Martins graduate Romina Karamanea, has now launched a new initiative. 
If you are based or happen to be passing in London, you will be able to visit the StyleShake studio to get a private styling session, get professionally measured and have a look at the fabrics on offer. The first 50 people who email the site will also get a one-to-one session with Creative Director Karamanea herself. Before (or maybe after!) sending your email to StyleShake, you can read the following interview with Iris Ben-David to get to know better the site and its history.
What inspired you to create StyleShake?
Fussiness. Every time I went shopping I would find a garment I liked but I would always think ‘Hmm, if only it would be a bit longer or a bit shorter, if only the colour would be different…’. In a nutshell, I would always find something I would have liked to change. My background is in marketing and advertising, so I have the skills to make something work on the Internet and I teamed up with Romina Karamanea. The site is an amazing opportunity to make a dream come true for anybody who likes designing their own stuff. It’s a bit like a shortcut to fashion design and it allows you to have a whole team of professionals working for you. We might not be able to turn you into John Galliano in one day, but it’s a nice way to feel creative and celebrate creativity and individualism.
What has been the response so far?
The site is quite popular, we were featured on various blogs and that has generated a lot of traffic. We have users that come everyday to design, rate and comment, it’s really starting to feel like a real community, people seem to get to know each other and communicating between themselves.
What’s the most difficult aspect of such a venture?
The manufacturing. Even people who have been working in manufacturing for ages find it a bit tricky. Our dresses are not mass produced, and we don’t produced them in sweatshops in the Far East. All the dresses are manufactured in our production unite in London and that’s because we want to make sure that every stitch is perfect. We have a production director who is totally crazy who wants the product to be immaculate; we look into each dress very carefully before we ship it and make sure that teh final product is flawless. Most of the designers have offshore factories in China, Sri Lanka and other places which are much cheaper, and, obviously, if you make 1000 dresses in the same style the price drops. At StyleShake each dress is one of a kind and that makes it much more expensive, the so price is fairly high, though we try to keep it low at the same time, because we want as many people as we can to enjoy their creativity. Every dress is like our baby, we take photos, we check it, we make sure the design is perfect, we really make an enormous effort to make sure that everything is fine. It’s a bit scary because all the different parts of this job have to work together perfectly. Another difficult aspect is the personal size. Many of us have different sizes for the upper and lower body and we allow the users to modify the sizes. So, for example, if you have a beautiful pear shaped silhouette, you can choose a bigger lower part and you can even specify your bra cup and skirt length.
Do you have any organic fabrics available on the site?
We are looking into this. Besides, instead of having a carrier bag, we ship the dress in an organic bag with a zipper that can be used later on. We would like to have a wider range of organic fabrics. It’s very important, and we are very ethical in the sense that we don’t work with sweatshops, as I said, it’s all done in London, and we check the workers and make sure that everyone is happy.
How will you improve the blog on the StyleShake site?
We’re going to add more content but not really advice on how to copy a trend and things like that. We want to give people advice on how to match the perfect dress to their figure and so on. Since we are promoting individualism I think we should concentrate on this rather than reporting from the catwalk and suggesting people to copy a trend.
Do you think the future of fashion lies in the Internet?
I think it’s a growing market and the numbers are growing, but I don’t think the High Street shops are going to disappear. People will always like going out shopping and visiting boutiques. However, this market is evolving, Internet shopping is growing and growing every year and I think a tool such as StyleShake can add value and interactivity to the whole shopping experience as it allows the shoppers to customise what they buy and communicate with other people.
Do you get any feedback from the StyleShake users?
The people in our community often send us suggestions about what they would like to see on our site, which we do take into account. For example, we added strapless dresses due to popular demand, as well as other styles, fabrics and colours.
What’s the future of StyleShake?
We would like to open branches in other places and we are looking into this at the moment.
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