That's a great question!
A little background: before we started Queenly, our users would often send payments and dresses to each other within large Facebook groups. As you might expect, very often it's hard to ensure security when you're shipping your wedding gown to a complete stranger across the country, or vice versa for a buyer sending money through Paypal. Queenly provides designer brand verification, shipping logistics, and quality checks, as well as our payment integration options (Stripe, Paypal, Quadpay installment payments) to take the burden out of that.
Alongside this challenge is the user needs of searching for a dress. Many online platforms don't handle the NLP search needs of needing to find a "size 6 off the shoulder lace wedding gown". In fact, if you search this dress size or category on Macy's, eBay, or Poshmark, you'll get inaccurate results. What we're doing at Queenly is putting those search needs as our top priority in our data pipeline, (shown in one example here: https://queenly.com/search?q=size%206%20lace%20wedding%20gow...)
Oh also, we thought of this when we met a user on our platform asking about attire for ice skating competitions! We figured that we can also expand this to competition / performance wear like what you had mentioned. We started talking to some users who perform as ballroom dancers, pianists, etc., and they all told us how expensive these garments are and how difficult it is to find them online. Thank you so much for this recommendation, we really wanna work hard this year to expand to this fully.
This has been very top of mind actually! We have some users who have uploaded a lot of qipaos and aoi dais already. For immigrant women, it's difficult to find any formal cultural wear unless your town has a Chinatown or ethnic stores that cater to it. We want to provide easier access to this inventory, especially for those living in the Midwest/South, who normally would not have as many, if not any, ethnic stores that sell cultural formalwear. Thank you so much for recognizing this need for immigrants!
For context on 1. We do indeed have both resale dresses as well as mom and pop dress boutiques with brand new inventory on our platform. The latter arose during the pandemic, as many of those shops unfortunately closed down and had to find a way to integrate their inventory online. It’s definitely a tricky UX challenge, to communicate the availability of both types of products on one platform. On this topic as well as the FAQ/dress cleaning subject, taking inspiration from how streetwear marketplaces is a great suggestion.
