Mr. Morton.

They grow up so fast, don't they? Local social shopping site Lyst, which launched April 2011, has just raised a $5 million Series A. Led by London-based DFJ Esprit, with Accel Partners, Alex Zubillaga and Venrex participating, the round will allow Lyst to staff up and work on building out its back end.

Ironic, right? Considering they're a fashion startup and all.

Like Pinterest or Tumblr, the site allows users to follow feeds from brands, stores, bloggers, and so forth. That creates a curated feed of products that you might like to perhaps purchase. If you like an item but not the price, you can add it to your "lyst" and receive a notice when it goes on sale.

That creates some technical challenges. Asked about his plans for the cash via email, CEO Chris Morton told us, "The funding will let us continue improving our site and the data behind it  - every single day tens of thousands of brand new items come onto Lyst so we're dealing with some quite complex problems!"

"Our aim is to put the consumer at the centre of the shopping experience: everyone is different, they like different things, so we want to give everyone their own, personalized experience when they shop," he added.

While they have everyone's attention, the company also announced it's been doubling its sales each month for the last three months. Of course, that could mean a lot of things. Mr. Morton told us,

"We don't disclose our actual sales figures, but last quarter millions of people used Lyst, driving millions of dollars in sales. Our average order value is $300."

In a statement released with the announcement, DFJ Esprit partner Nic Brisbourne called the company's potential for expansion "tremendous," and added,

"Social networking is part of all aspects of life today and fashion brands are keen to gain exposure through channels such as Facebook and Pinterest, with Lyst converting this exposure into purchases. The monies raised will be invested in development, marketing and partnerships to improve the user experience on Lyst and accelerate growth.”

The company will also continue to grow its teams in both New York and London.

At the Meetup. (flickr.com/alextorrenegra)

MEET 'N GREET Monday, June 5, is this month's New York Tech Meetup. Presenters range from Fitocracy to Loosecubes. If you haven't bought tickets, you've got one more chance: There's one batch left, and they go on sale Friday.

MORNING, SUNSHINE News.me has just revamped its morning email, ramping up the "daily briefing" angle. Not only has the company redesigned the whole thing, News.me's editor will be pick three big stories to summarize every morning. Also added: stuff you missed and an image. Because images are snazzy.

SALE SALE SALE For all the pinatics out there: social commerce platform Lyst has debuted a tool that'll allow you to receive an instant sale alert whenever something on your Pinterest boards goes on sale. In addition, Lyst will notify users who pin an item from a store whether that item can be had elsewhere.

GROWING UP We hear that NYC's Lean Startup Meetup just shot past 2,500 members.

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER The Startup Genome, a.k.a. the source of those crazy stats regarding New York's high rate of female founders, has launched the Investor Compass, a dashboard allowing users to centralize data about the startups they're working with. It's designed to help investors, advisors, and other interested parties make better decisions, leveraging the 17,000-startup database the organization has already built. For more details, check the company blog.

MOVING ON UP On the heels of launching their new search platform for homebuyers, RealDirect.com is moving into its own new home. The online real estate brokerage is settling into new digs on 21st St. Presumably the new office has plenty of space for all the planned hires: The company just hired three new agents and plans to staff up further, with new people to cover new areas in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

SUNSHINE AND SHOPPING The folks at Tip or Skip, an app billed as enabling "window shopping from anywhere," are organizing a "Tip Crawl" on June 3 at the Brooklyn Flea. Attendees will use the app to snap pics of their best finds.

DIGITAL ATTIC Persnickety about your private pics? None too sure about Facebook's ever-shifting settings? Last week you got a new storage option. That would be miLifemap, a digital storage locker designed to offer families a private place to keep everything important. Though we must confess, we are of the generation that thinks half the fun of having fun is showing off.

GET A JOB GameChanger needs a VP of Marketing. Details are here. Canvas needs a senior Javascript developer. For more, check out this ad. Turntable.fm needs a lead designer. Learn more on their jobs page.

Mr. Morton.

For an industry based entirely on trends, fashion is having a social media moment.

Designers and retailers have their own social media accounts, using Twitter, Facebook and other sites to hawk their goods to people who enjoy spending their time quantifying their friends through a number on a webpage. Fashion-centric startups are increasingly en vogue. There is even a blog to keep track of them all: FashInvest, "where fashion meets finance."

Among the stream of startups of varying degrees of success is New York and London-based Lyst, which first piqued our interest at Fashion Week, when a friendly publicist pitched the site to us with a wide smile.

Lyst is sort of like Twitter, kinda like Tumblr, comparable to Pinterest and described as a fashion version of Pandora or Last.fm. Basically, it’s a fancy digital catalog. Fashionistas can sign-up through their Twitter or Facebook accounts, and after a few questions are directed to their “Stylefeed,” which is an endlessly scrollable display of curated items. Connecting with one's friends via social networks, or following fashion bloggers affiliated through the site, will tailor the content on users' feeds.

CEO and co-founder Chris Morton describes the site as a tool for “fashion discovery,” cutting through the white noise of the behemoth fashion industry.

Lyst was born in 2010 with a seed round which raised close to a million pounds from various investment companies, including Accel, Ventrex and angels in New York and London. Mr. Morton and his co-founder and CTO Sebastjan Trepca had no prior business experience or knowledge of fashion prior to Lyst.

“We had more of a personal interest in fashion,” said Mr. Morton, calling the fashion industry a puzzle he finds, “perfectly interesting.”

Mr. Morton is a former investor and business manager who graduated from Cambridge and speaks with the expected accent. Mr. Morton is quite young; in the photo that accompanies his interview on the blog Fashion We Like, he strikes a dashing pose in a stylish suit, with his dark hair in a Don Draper-like coif.

Mr. Trepca studied computer science and was previously the VP of Engineering at Noovo, a content discovery startup.

Lyst has already put down roots, with 500 global affiliates, relationships with tens of thousands of designers (displaying merchandise directly from individuals and major houses, who get the bulk of the profits after Lyst takes its cut) and hundreds of thousands of users.

If you use the site to connect with your friends, you'll likely get a lot out of it--provided you have friends with good taste and style. If your friends have no style, well, you're going to have a tacky feed. Regardless, Lyst needs lots of users in devoted social circles to be an effective “social media” fashion website, much less a purveyor of goods.

Lyst has money riding on its success as a social media website. Because it is a pure affiliate model, it only gets money if its users buy items after seeing them on Lyst. So the people sharing and Tweeting, blogging and Pinning, need to buy enough clothes to keep the website afloat. Vice-versa, serious shoppers who prefer the site for the personalized shopping experience, need to purchase enough goods to power the thousands of users who use it purely for gawking at fashion and social networking. But how many of those members are buying? And will they buy enough?

Though Mr. Morton touts the social media experience of the site, it like many of the other fashion affiliate websites uses an algorithm as the basis for its shopping recommendations. While the algorithms may be influenced by your interactions with friends, ultimately the items that pop up on your Lyst page are churned out by software that generates suggestions based on the info you type in.

The website is easy to navigate, with a classic (or cliched?) fashion-y black and white color scheme and slick serif fonts. Tags across the top of the site take you to the designers, stores and categories in Lyst's stable. Users can be ultra-specific with their queries with the sidebar running up the left side of the page, with categories including gender, price, sales, colors, designers and stores. Whittling down the general site to find the perfect pair of shoes (to use an obvious example) is fast and easy, especially for a determined shopper.

For strict research purposes, I decided to look for women's loafers, something I had been seeing around on the street--and also because the cost of the strappy heels and platforms showing up on the unfiltered shoe category made me do a mental spit-take. Not everyone can be a Carrie Bradshaw; a girl’s got rent to pay.

It was pretty easy to find options. Obviously, there are more choices the higher your budget, but in many categories Lyst has cheaper items. Still, it hurt to scroll lazily through my Stylefeed and see gorgeous Marchesa dresses retailing for the same amount as a semester's tuition.

Fashion is a fickle creature, both on the runway and on the web, which has claimed startups before Lyst (ToVieFor, Catwalk Genius, MyNines, Tote). Fashion designers have publicly aired frustrations with Tumblr, which has become insanely popular with fashionistas but hasn’t been as successful with fashion houses. While the concept of a fashion site integrating social media is very “now,” it is ultimately the business of fashion which will decide the website's fate.

There will never be a lack of authoritative voices guiding the consumer toward trends. Fashion is a top-down business that requires tastemakers to function. Consider the success that individual fashion bloggers like Bryanboy and the teenaged Tavi Gevinson have had making a dent on the upper echelons of fashion. But how many of your Facebook friends and Twitter followers are hardly Bryanboys and Tavis? Fashion craves critics and abhors a popular vote. Unlike the industry, many fashion startups are bottom-up—and that's why they, well, go bottom up.

Lyst says it has hundreds of thousands of registered users. But how many of those users are there to compare their taste with their friends, and how many are there to shell out big money on designer labels, especially when there are similar fashion startups, online luxury retailer Net-a-Porter, department store websites and designers themselves?

Lyst functions both as a diversion and a shopping resource. It needs enough people using it for the latter to survive, though the social media appeal of the site draws what is doubtlessly a more youthful contingent of shoppers with smaller disposable incomes. Ultimately, Lyst needs money to run, which depends upon volume of sales and revenue from their affiliates.

The company is going to have to pull massive sales to stay afloat in the fashion business online (if its large funding round is any indication) and there are definitely a few holes in Lyst’s seams. But can Lyst buck the trend of failed fashion startups? Mr. Morton thinks so, and he’s convinced more than a few fashionistas.