by Elizabeth

It's time for part 2 of our Shiny Orb summer update.  We launched our site back in December with just a few thousand dresses aggregated from a couple of online stores.  Today, we have ~20k dresses from across 17 online stores including Macy's, Zappos, and Modcloth.com.  In the past few weeks, we've added wedding dresses and everyday dresses to our repertoire.  We've grown quite a bit, and this is just the beginning.  

You'll need to stay tuned to see our next big launch in a few months.  But, here's a hint: we're changing the look and feel as well as the user experience of our site.  And, that's just the beginning.  Very exciting times this summer.  We'll be sure to catch some rays in front of our computer screens.  

As always, we'd love to hear from you.  Drop me a line at elizabeth@shinyorb.com.

by Elizabeth

Read the title of this post out loud 10 times.  :)  It's time for a 2-part Shiny Orb update to remind us where we've come from and discuss where we're going.  This week, I want to touch upon social shopping and community on Shiny Orb.

Though it's been less than 2 months since publicly launching the Shiny Orb Dressing Rooms, we've received a fair bit of attention from prominent tech journals for this concept, including the MIT Entrepreneurship Review and Social Commerce Today.  Just last week, I wrote a guest article on GigaOm explaining that I see e-commerce transforming into a more social experience.  The next wave of shopping sites will be hybrids between stores and communities.  

On Shiny Orb, the Dressing Room feature is just the first step to socializing the wedding apparel shopping experience and building a community.  Last week, we added Love It buttons and Facebook Connect features.  In the next few months, Jennifer and I will be refining and adding social features on Shiny Orb to build community and make shopping social and fun.  We strongly believe that wedding apparel shopping is inherently a social experience.  It's necessary to move that online, and we would love to hear your experience with our Shiny Orb Dressing Room (for a $20 Amazon gift card) and thoughts on this topic.  Drop me a line at elizabeth@shinyorb.com.

I hope everyone is having a great summer!  The big news doesn't stop here at Shiny Orb.  I'm excited to announce 2 new happenings.

First, I'd like to welcome our new Shiny Orb blogger, Liz (not to be confused with Elizabeth).  We're super excited that Liz will be working with us for the summer, focusing on fashion trends and inspirations for your fall and winter weddings.  She's already done a few posts on denim bridesmaid dresses, organic dresses, and neutral modern bridesmaid dresses.  We love the inspiration boards she's already put together and look forward to her upcoming posts.  Liz hails from the San Francisco Bay Area, where we knew her from high school as well.  But she now lives and works in New York where she is enjoying the big city life.  We are so happy to welcome her to the Shiny Orb team! Here's what Liz says,

Hello everyone! I'm thrilled to join the Shiny Orb team as a style blogger and thanks for reading my posts. Elizabeth and Jennifer have been hatching this business idea for as long as I've known them, and I am super excited about where Shiny Orb is headed. Feel free to write me at liz@shinyorb.com to share your wedding style tips or questions!

Secondly, so many of you have asked us when you'll be able to sort dresses by color.  Well, we've finally done it -- I'm pleased to announce that we now have a color filter in our search tool.  As always, please let us know we can improve the experience and what new features you'd like to see on Shiny Orb.

By Jennifer

           

Click here to download:

Yup_got_married_tags_shiny_orb.zip (321 KB)

Gosh, it's been two weeks already! When Tim and I decided to get married we knew we wanted a low-key kind of wedding. Being the couple we are, planning was a relatively stress-free affair because we kept things simple.

To that end, we decided to have a small ceremony with just parents and grandparents in attendance. We picked the same day as graduation, so we got our doctorates in the morning and ran off to get married at a beautiful roof garden across the street from campus. (My parents also got married on their graduation day!)

Not wanting to leave out our best friends, we still opted for bridesmaids and groomspeople. Everyone looked fabulous all dressed up.  So with my good friend and photographer Sam Lipoff, we went about the city of Boston taking some fun pictures. We even took the water taxi across the harbor so we could capture the gorgeous Boston skyline in our photos.

We held an evening reception, where we met up with the rest of our friends.  Tim and I chose a hotel bar with a swanky, private red lounge, and we partied until closing time. I love how after all the guests have gone home, Elizabeth was still ready to order just one more drink, barefoot. It was a great few days. :)

By Elizabeth

Jennifer and I are pleased to announce that Shiny Orb Dressing Rooms are now open to all. We're extremely appreciative of the awesome help we've received from our beta testers. They've provided us with ample feedback and support.  So after intensely developing, testing, and iterating side by side with these brides, we are confident Shiny Orb Dressing Rooms is a feature brides and their bridal parties are going to enjoy.

Honestly, we thought up Shiny Orb Dressing Rooms out of frustration. It was just so hard to shop together online for bridesmaid dresses for Elizabeth's wedding. So, we decided to make things right for Jennifer's wedding and built Shiny Orb Dressing Rooms. We knew there were so many more modern brides in the same boat with their web savvy bridal parties scattered about. As more and more women move around the world to pursue their dreams, passions, and careers, we know this is an ever-increasing trend. That's why at Shiny Orb, our goal is to create an enjoyable social shopping experience for bridesmaid dresses and wedding apparel.

Create your own Shiny Orb Dressing Room today and let us know what you think!

By Elizabeth

When we started Shiny Orb back in December, Jennifer and I envisioned a website where bridal parties could browse and shop a large selection of dresses together. By large selection, I mean LARGE. Today, I'm pleased to announce we now have over 10,000 bridesmaid dresses and other wedding apparel on our site. But, we are just touching the tip of the iceberg. Stay tuned for more dresses to come...

Check out bridesmaid dresses and other wedding apparel from our new online retailer partners: eDressMe, Charlotte Russe, PromGirl, Zappos, and Buy.com.  By adding these retailers' dresses to our style-based search, bridal parties can now peruse dresses from 300+ designers.

Here are some of our favorites:

Search our entire collection today!

By Elizabeth

A faster browsing experience
With this new web host, we'll be able to accommodate a greater number of simultaneous users, which means more speed for browsing thousands of dresses. 

More available dressing rooms
Based on the initial feedback we've heard from brides and their bridal parties, I'm thrilled that we can now add more Shiny Orb dressing rooms.

Now that we're able to handle a greater load, we'll resume tweeting out dressing room access codes so that more bridal parties can get dressing rooms. 

More dresses
Lastly, we're going to add way more dresses to provide you with an even greater selection.  Right now we have ~6000 bridesmaid dresses in our dress catalog, and ~8000 dresses in total. 

So, that's our Shiny Orb update, but we need your help.  Please take our survey via the widget that pops up in the bottom-right corner of your screen.  (If you don't see it, you've probably already taken the survey -- thanks!)  Please let us know what you think of our site, how we can make it better, and what designers and retailers you'd like us to add.  Thanks!

by Elizabeth 

Jennifer and I are pleased to announce the private beta launch of Shiny Orb Dressing Rooms.  We've been testing this with a handful of brides and their bridesmaids, including Jennifer's bridal party.  With this, bridal parties will be able to centralize coordination of bridesmaid dress selection.  Shiny Orb Dressing Rooms make it simple for bridal parties to shop for dresses together, even though they may not be in the same place at the same time.  We hope you'll enjoy using these dressing rooms.  For now, dressing rooms are limited, but our blog readers can jump to the front of the waitlist by signing up here.

A snapshot inside Jennifer's dressing room:

As always, we'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback on this feature.

By Jennifer

   

Click here to download:

Its_official_--_Im_engaged_tag.zip (33 KB)

It's finally official. I got engaged this past weekend! It feels kind of odd announcing it into the blogosphere, but I'm really excited. :)

Although my fiance and I had talked about getting married and had even started planning our wedding, I only just got this gorgeous ring.  It's a three-stone ring with a square-cut emerald in a trellis setting.  My favorite color is green so the emerald seemed like a natural choice.  Plus, I really like how the inclusions and other "imperfections" in natural emerald give the ring a unique personality.    

The fiance did a great job. I can't stop smiling. :)

by Elizabeth

We want to thank the person who took the time to let us know today that several products in our catalog had been sold out on our retail partners' sites.  I'm happy to say we started working on it immediately, and three and a half hours later, we've removed every sold out product in our catalog.  Although we constantly check Shiny Orb to make sure it's running smoothly, we do miss things and really appreciate your letting us know about issues.  Even if something is not amiss, we'd still love to hear from you so we can continue to improve the user experience on Shiny Orb.