EXCLUSIVE.

Get your wallet and brace for one-stop holiday shopping. CNET reports that Macy's has teamed up with Diddy-owned clothier Sean Jean to create THE must-have gift for the men in your life: A fleece sweater that comes with a video screen sewn into the sleeve.

Stylish does not even begin to describe it. Also it's great for costume parties, in case you want to dress up as a Times Square billboard.

Check these specs:

A 2.8-inch OLED display slips into a pouch on the fleece pullover and displays video at a resolution of 320x240. The palm-size video unit has 2GB of onboard memory for storing videos, so wearers can customize their sleeve showings, and it boasts up to 10 hours of battery life.

Or, as Macy's put it: "Wearable electronics is the next big thing–it’s a game changer. Just think of all the attention you'll get at the clubs!"

Game. Changer.

List price is $198, but if you act now, one of these babies can be had for $125 a pop. We give it about two weeks before the Biebs turns up wearing one.

Ms. Nguyen (Photo: We Are NY Tech)

New York-based street style social network Thre.ad announced in an email sent out to users today that it will be shutting down. The company's owners would probably rather you think of it as a pivot, however: According to the announcement, they're folding Thre.ad into a new ecommerce site called That's Foxy, which will deliver "shop-able products that are inspired by what’s trending in the community."

The email announcement explains that the transition from Thre.ad to That's Foxy is due to the fact that many of Thre.ad's users browsing street style looks wanted the option to be able to easily shop for the items showcased in the photos. A quick perusal of That's Foxy shows street style-like photos with a specific accessory or article of clothing highlighted, which users can click to purchase.

Thre.ad launched in private beta in November 2011 and was in the process of raising a $760,000 round back in February; according to its Form D, the company had raised $560,000 of that round. No updated Form Ds have since been filed.

The company's CEO, Mimi Nguyen, is a fixture on the New York tech social scene. Last year, she helped organize the Raise Cache fashion show to help benefit Hack NY. Justin Bieber, who knows Ms. Nguyen through a nonprofit she cofounded called Pencils of Promise, was rumored to have agreed to invest in Thre.ad, though that was never confirmed. "If he ever wants to [invest], I wouldn’t be against that,” Ms. Nguyen told Mashable at the time.

Wonder if the Biebs will be willing to toss some cash at That's Foxy?

Before you buy that bag, consider how you're going to explain it at the office! (Photo: flickr.com/megleo)

Many of the tech-talking ladies of Silicon Valley, like so many women with discretionary income to burn, love fashion. Only, if this New York Times piece--dubbed "Breaking Tech’s Fashion Taboo"--is any indication, they're not allowed to just enjoy a thing that they like. No, they must justify it.

Let us start by trotting out a truth apparently universally acknowledged, which is that style is suspect among denizens of the West Coast tech scene (or at least style that doesn't involve the latest fashion in socks):

But in a place where the most highly prized style is to appear to ignore style altogether and the hottest accessory is the newest phone, a growing group of women is bucking convention not only by being women in a male-dominated industry, but also by unabashedly embracing fashion.

This means that fashion requires some sort of explanation, missy. Newly minted Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer explains her devotion in terms of engineering:

“Designing software and products isn’t all that different from the design of clothes,” Ms. Mayer, 37, the new chief executive of Yahoo, said in an interview last February. She once paid $60,000 at an auction for lunch with Oscar de la Renta. “Like components of software,” she said, “fashion designers learned how to do this shoulder, put pleats on the skirt that way.”

Leilia Janah, founder and CEO of Samasource, feels the need to tie it to a larger design philosophy:

“Fashion is expressing my aesthetic sense just as much as our Web site is.”

Accel Partners investor Theresia Gouw Ranzetta makes dressing sharp sound like some kind of negotiation tactic:

“When it’s a sea of young guys in jeans and hoodies, and the V.C.’s are in their khakis and button-down uniform, it’s kind of a benefit to be different.”

If Larry Ellison doesn't have to justify buying Lanai, women in tech ought to be able to wear whatever they damn well please.

A shot from the Stylecaster/Etsy photoshoot in DUMBO.

Stylecaster, the community-driven fashion platform, has teamed up with the Internet's answer to Zooey Deschanel, Etsy, to help bring accessible fashion to the masses. The two NYC-based companies collaborated on a photoshoot near Etsy's HQ at Dewey's Candy Store in painfully hip Dumbo. It's a powerful collision of New York startups and style, so be sure to don your best shades, lest you be blinded by the breathtaking twee-ness of it all.

"In order to direct the stylish shopper to entrepreneurial e-commerce & crafts, as opposed to unattainable runway fashion, StyleCaster's team of expert editors curated some of Etsy's finest to style its most recent photo shoot," said Meghan Cross, Stylecaster's director of communications, in an email. "In partnership with Etsy, StyleCaster is pushing the boundaries of high-fashion styling, supporting the incredible talent that first flourishes online - before the runway."

Stylecaster is also teaming up with Polyvore, an outfit and inspiration community, to help curate some of their best boards. The first page of the Polyvore editorial features New York style icon and Pinterest poster girl Olivia Palermo, along with an adorable pastel bike posed near a flower stand, so the whole spread should have a million pins by the time we post this.

Check out two exclusive photos from the Stylecaster/Etsy photoshoot below.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to the fashion site Polyvore as an "Alley darling;" it is in fact based in Mountain View. Betabeat regrets the error.

The men of Clothes Horse, confident that they're wearing the right size.

Last April, Stephanie Clifford's New York Times story, "One Size Fits Nobody," went viral. (Or at least as viral as a non-Linsane animal-based memes can possibly go.) That's probably because Ms. Clifford's confession--that she varies anywhere from a size 4 to size 8 without gaining a pound--is a near-universal dilemma. Clothes Horse, a New York-based startup that launched publicly today, thinks it can solve that.

Brands like Bonobos, one of Clothes Horse's beta test cases, use the startup's software to embed a widget on their e-commerce site. After 30-seconds of questions like "What brand's shirt fits you best?" or "Is it tight around the chest?" the widget spits out information on how that retailer's items are likely to fit.

To do that, Clothes Horse uses an algorithm that combines a database of human measurements, sizing specifics from about 50 brands, and some kind of "secret sauce," which cofounder Vik Venkatraman declined to describe.

We first heard of Clothes Horse over cocktails a few weeks ago when Dave Whittemore, another Clothes Horse cofounder, described the process of going into stores to surreptitiously measure one of every size of a particular garment. "Hahaha. We don't usually measure IN the store, but we have been known to buy/return some stuff," Mr. Venkatraman told Betabeat over gChat.

Early beta tests with Bonobos showed a 13 percent boost in sales. But there's also the matter of bringing down shopping cart abandonment and reducing the rate of return for ill-fitting garments you totally thought were your size.

Besides Bonobos, Clothes Horse is already embedded in sites like Modus Man, Duke & Winston, Five Four Jeans, and Frank & Oak. Women's clothes, the Rubik's cube of sizing, are also tap. "We have some terrific brand partners that we're at different stages of a discussion with," said Mr. Venkatraman. As a SaaS business, retailers pay a monthly flat-fee based on their online traffic and revenue. Clothes Horse, which was incubated in DreamIt's inaugural New York City class, has raised an undisclosed seed round led by Contour Ventures.

Mr. Venkatraman thinks the potential of the software is "massive" and didn't seem worried retailers muscling into his newfound niche. "Fashion is just on the cusp of tipping to the future, which could see the industry moving from 8% online to 40%+. The network effects we build through users and brands will be tough for any individual retailer to replicate," he said, adding, "I mean: for the "same" size 32 jeans in Old Navy, BR and Gap will be all different--and that's the same company!"

A fashion tech startup in New York that isn't an e-commerce site or purely social play and provides a clearly monetizable public utility? Well, will wonders never cease.

Rich Tong, rumored to be the now-former Fashion Director at Tumblr.

Betabeat's just recieved word from three different sources familiar with the situation that Tumblr's Rich Tong, Tumblr's Fashion Director, is on his way out of the company.We're told that Mr. Tong sent an email out to a list of friends tonight saying as much, with "further details to come." Why the breakup? Another source familiar with the situation explained that Mr. Tong—who's been out of the office for much of the last three weeks, and whose diminishing presence has not gone unnoticed by the rest of the staff—saw himself in a much more "entrepreneurial" light than the capacity his job had him working in, which was a much more "ambassador"-esque role with regards to helping fashion brands become acquainted with Tumblr.

Earlier this year, Mr. Tong found himself in the middle of a fashion-related fiasco, wherein two brand managers criticized Mr. Tong for his inability to provide analytics for brands, and failure to cultivate relationships with brands who adopted Tumblr as a platform early on. Things got much worse when Tumblr's proposal for fashion brands participating in Fashion Week—an unofficial pay-for-play, essentially—leaked out:

The proposal asked for $100,000 to have 4 of Tumblr’s “select bloggers” produce 15 posts for the brand’s Tumblr during the week, with the “exact nature of the content to be agreed upon prior to the start of the week.” For $150,000 brands could get ad placement on the official NY Fashion week Tumblr. For $350,000 they could get ad placement on the Tumblr tagged “fashion” page. For $10,000 big fashion brands could spend a little quality time with the 20 select bloggers at a private event. Product placement was also offered “At cost”, with the “influential tastemakers” being promised at a group rate.

"Entrepreneurial," indeed. More trouble struck when the legality of such a proposal was questioned:

Tumblr had no formal contract with any of these bloggers. In fact, the bloggers Betabeat spoke with had no idea their services were being promised, no clue about the terms of the proposal and were blissfully ignorant that Tumblr was asking to be paid hefty sums for their work.

Mr. Tong started at Tumblr October 2010. Both Tumblr and Rich Tong have not responded to immediate requests for comment. We'll update if we hear more. Know more? Give us a shout.

Tumblr Fashion Director Rich Tong

Earlier this year Tumblr was the toast of fashion week. The company's fashion director, Rich Tong, negotiated access for influential Tumblr users to cover swanky events. The bloggers, once the red headed step children of Fashion Week, got access beyond their wildest dreams. The brands and designers got their shows covered on a hip social network that drove a ton of traffic and engagement. It was a win-win.

Things are playing out a little differently this time. It started with the proposal Mr. Tong circulated to fashion brands and agencies. Unlike last year, Tumblr is now asking to be paid.

The proposal asked for $100,000 to have 4 of Tumblr's "select bloggers" produce 15 posts for the brand's Tumblr during the week, with the "exact nature of the content to be agreed upon prior to the start of the week."

For $150,000 brands could get ad placement on the official NY Fashion week Tumblr. For $350,000 they could get ad placement on the Tumblr tagged "fashion" page.

For $10,000 big fashion brands could spend a little quality time with the 20 select bloggers at a private event. Product placement was also offered "At cost", with the "influential tastemakers" being promised at a group rate.

It was an attempt to find a revenue stream for a company that thus far has focused little on making money. But the execution left something to be desired.

"They clearly don't understand the first thing about ad buying," said an agency rep with more than a decade in digital sales who received Mr. Tong's proposal. "They didn't explain how these ads would be served or offer us any way to track them, even through a third party. How am I supposed to present that to a client?"

Prior to becoming Fashion Director at Tumblr, Mr. Tong co-founded two fashion startups, Weardrobe and Index F. He also worked as a front end developer at UNICEF. None of these positions involved client services or ad sales, which he now handles as fashion director at Tumblr.

"He is David Karp's friend and that seems to be his main qualification for this job," said one very angry designer. "Now they are trying to have us pay for Tumblr bloggers to come to our shows, which is ridiculous. We would never pay a journalist to come cover us, so why would we pay Tumblr?"

No one Betabeat spoke with thought that Tumblr was a bad platform for fashion, quite the opposite. The ease of posting images and re-blogging items makes it a terrific platform which has driven a lot of eyeballs to brands and designers. "But they need an experienced ad sales team and someone who knows how to be diplomatic when they are turning people down," said one brand manager.

Numerous sources bemoaned the lack of basic analytical tools. Tumblr's inability to deliver these features made their requests for paid blogger placement and big name ad sales particularly galling.

"When I go into a meeting with a client to talk about Tumblr, I have to sit there and count out the number of notes on each post by hand, literally," said one frustrated agency rep. "We would pay to not have to do that."

Betabeat reached out to Tumblr for comment and will update with their response.

Update: This is perhaps a response....

Update 2: Nope, not a response, just a quirk of Tumblr. These two didn't like my post, but a post by Mike Hudack in defense of Tumblr, which was a response to a Tumblr post by Elizabeth Spiers.

What me worry?

Yesterday Betabeat wrote a post about some of the frustrations folks in the fashion industry have been venting about Tumblr--on their personal Tumblrs of course. Well, apparently, the story struck a nerve. Raman Kia, the Head of Digital Marketing at Starworks Group, laid things out in a post titled Exposed: The Actual Problem With Tumblr: (The text, below, has been lightly edited for brevity.)

Related: The Fashion Industry Wants Tumblr to Get its Fucking Act Together

My team and I represent 15 of the most prestigious and powerful brands in the fashion space. I am also married to the aforementioned Jessica Coghan of Digitalista fame. I have this year tried on two occasions to work with Tumblr on a professional level. So, I am coming to the table from a position of truth and authority.

In the first instance we invited Tumblr to a meeting with one of our clients. I am not in a position to reveal any names but I can assure you that this brand is one of the largest online retailers of luxury fashion globally. The meeting was set to discuss mutually benefitting opportunities. So, it came as a surprise to my client that the person representing Tumblr at this meeting had no idea who my client was. Let me just put this in perspective: This is one of the biggest retailer of luxury fashion in the world (did I already say that?) – and probably one of the most reputable and prestigious. It’s like saying I am the Director of Automotive but I’ve never heard of BMW or Mercedes!

Like I said, my team and I represent 15 of the most prestigious fashion brands in the world. You would think we would be treated with professionalism. So, let me ask you: do you think I will in good conscience recommend a paid partnership between a client and Tumblr at this point in time?

NO! Let me make it even more clear ABSOLUTELY NOT! My team and I are just the kind of people that make social media platforms really rich. We have been spending dollars on Facebook since media programs have been available; we have been part of every media based beta program on twitter; we were one of the very first to do a paid promotion with a fashion brand on Foursquare; and I am almost certain that under our guidance our clients were one of the very first handful of fashion brands to join Instagram, and for what it’s worth Tumblr.

Let me be clear our experience with all of these platforms has not always been without it’s problems. Not all Facebook reps have been fantastic, Twitter support for the longest time was hard to come by, Tristen Walker for a long time was a lone ranger at Foursquare – you get the picture – but I can with my hand on my heart say one thing with full confidence: at a senior level all of these networks and platforms showed us empathy in the face of our concerns.

So far Tumblr has behaved with prejudice, without empathy, and without apology and, in doing so, it has bitten the hand it hopes will feed it someday. So make no mistake Tumblr can not correct this by developing platform analytics – it needs a change of regime and a change of culture.

Thanks
Raman Kia
PS. This blog was written using wordpress. I love Tumblr. I have a Tumblr page. It is really fun – but then again so is the Disney store.

In the post, Mr. Kia pointed out that he has had terrific experiences working with other small startups like Foursquare and Instagram.

A number of media sources in New York had aired this kind of grievance before, often directed pointedly at Tumblr's fashion director Rich Tong. But this is the first time a major agency in the fashion industry has publicly derided Tumblr's business practices and given specific, if guarded, examples.

Tumblr president and resident grown-up John Maloney issued a terse response on his Tumblr: "Gradatim Ferociter" which translates loosely as, "step by step, courageously".

What me worry?

Tumblr is reportedly in the midst of raising its biggest round to date, bumping the company's valuation to a whopping $800 million. But while Tumblr has great growth to go along with this funding, it still has almost no revenue, outside of the chump change it collects on paid themes and the partnerships it has with established industries.

One of Tumblr's biggest success stories thus far has been its relationship with the fashion industry. Tumblr had its bloggers featured during fashion week. Big brand and startups have both invested heavily in the platform. For some startups, Tumblr is the audience network on which they built their business.

But patience is starting to wear thin, even among Tumblr's fashionable fans. Many are tired of being asked to pay for sponsorships, especially when they would rather be investing in basic analytical tools which Tumblr seems unable or unwilling to deliver. 

UPDATE: Tumblr is Reportedly Looking to Hire a VP of Finance to Gets Its Business in Order

Last night Jessica Coghan, Director of Digital Media at the influential fashion PR house Starworks, which reps brands like Ann Taylor and Kate Spade, posted this from her Tumblr:

So, I am sure you have all heard that Tumblr is sending some bloggers to fashion week again this season. I have also had the pleasure of seeing their sponsorship proposal being shopped around to brands, which I am not supposed to be talking about. I will say this… someone is completely out of their goddamn mind.

Fashion brands have adopted this platform in a big way and do you want to know what fashion brands need from Tumblr? An analytics dashboard! We are on all here managing blogs with the help of Google Analytics, but there is nothing catering to the tumblr only based metrics- reblogs, likes, followers, etc. There is nothing out there to help brands quantify their presence here. What works? What doesn’t? And it’s not about visitors- it’s about engagement in the oh so tumblr way.

They could actually make money from this analytics platform- I would pay for it for my clients. I would absolutely get behind a cost like that on an evergreen basis, which has to make way more money than this flash in the pan fashion week nonsense.

This is not the first time Betabeat has heard about the problems fashion folks have with Tumblr's dashboard. In fact on two or three separate occasions fashion-tech startups have reached out to us to pitch a similar complaint. But its worth noting that its not just the startups which are angry, but the big brands as well. As Julie Fredrickson, who does Digital and Social Media at Ann Taylor wrote on her Tumblr in response to Ms. Coghan's post,

I am going to go on record saying that no one at Tumblr reached out to Ann Taylor with a proposal for Fashion Week and we are

1) the first fashion brand to be on Tumblr (even though we carefully avoid press since this piece as a company)

2) have invested MAJOR brand and development dollars into the platform (see ArtSheSaid, OnTumblr) going on for over a year now.

3) Actually have the wherewithall and knowledge to be a good sponsor of this as a company

Please someone who is a grown up at Tumblr listen to the brands that care about you. It isn’t just Users First, Brands Second. Hell at this point you are Users First, Brands never. Take a cue from Michael Lazerow’s comments on that post and realize that brands pay the bills when VCs stop.

Rich Tong-if you don’t actively pursue these options you are not doing your job. You know that Ann Taylor loves Tumblr, you know that we invest money, and yet you have ignored us. Unless I am mistaken your job is “Fashion Director” so act like it.

Sure, you could point out all these complaints about Tumblr were posted on Tumblr, which seems to have a lock on the personal blogs of fashion industry folks. But it certainly seems as though, if Tumblr isn't careful, the blogging wunderkind may squander the goodwill and business opportunity the fashion industry presents.

Who's afraid of the big bad web?

A new fashion start-up launching in September has secured backing from some of the biggest names in angel investing on the East and West coasts. Edition01 has raised around $500,000 from David Tisch, Ken Lerer and Ron Conway's SV Angel to build an e-commerce site focusing on capsule collections: limited edition runs of products by designers like Donna Karan, Calvin Klein and Narciso Rodriguez. Additional investors include Kal Vepuri, High Line Venture Partners, the Sagrera family, Sterling Equities, Joanne Wilson and Alex Zubillaga.

"Sites like Gilt have created a great business selling items with a limited time period. We are aiming to do a similar thing by having a very limited inventory," says co-founder Rishi Khanna. "The idea to build a best in breed capsule sale site that leverages social commerce and online ordering."

Traditionally, says co-founder Jessica Wilpon Kamel, who created Edition01 with co-founder Estefania Lacayo in October of 2010, high-end fashion designers have been afraid of the internet. "Even today many of them are going in the opposite direction, pulling their merchandise offline because they are afraid it will dilute their brand. We want to show that doesn't have to be the case."

The start-up had been looking to raise a little north of $1 million, but found an early revenue stream through a partnership with Salam International, which secured them a licensing deal for a sponsored pop-up store in high-end fashion mall in Doha, Quatar. The focus now is on making a big splash with the September debut and giving customers a high-end shopping experience online that matches up with the designer brands.

There is a burgeoning network, says Ms. Kamel, for fashion entrepreneurs to connect with venture capitalists who traditionally have focused on the web. Through Ben Lerer and friends at Gilt the team from Edition01 was able to take meetings with numerous New York investors and eventually secure a round from a very diverse group. While Betabeat doesn't have an informed opinion on whether or not this start-up will succeed (we don't know Donna Karen from Don King), the overlap of fashion and technology is certainly one strength that will help New York to compete with Silicon Valley in the coming decade.