Making fashion more personal, social, and effortless.

People didn’t need a store. They needed a tool.

We started with a founder’s belief: people don’t just buy and sell clothes, they express identity through style.

Fifteen interviews and a direct Depop and Poshmark audit tested that belief before we committed to build. The 87% stat and the closet quote turned intuition into direction.

15 interviews with vintage enthusiasts, plus a direct audit of Depop and Poshmark.

Both have strong discovery and social features, but both are built around transactions. Depop’s new Outfits tool styles shoppable collages; Poshmark’s “closet” is a seller’s inventory.

Neither gives people a private space to catalog and combine what they already own. Cinched’s digital closet has the opposite goal: buying less by making your wardrobe usable again.

I tested drag-and-drop, swipe-to-add, and template-based builders. Drag-and-drop won on playfulness and flexibility.

The call came from early build reviews, not an A/B test. With two engineers and no live users, waiting for statistical proof meant not shipping, so I chose to validate after launch.

What we tried and left behind

I also tested stacked cards for closet item selection, to see how tactile the experience could feel.

Cinched shipped as an MVP with the outfit builder, digital closet, and wishlist. Our first in-person pop-up in Austin, TX was the real-money test: $127.65 across 9 sales in 3.5 hours, 80% through Apple Pay, and zero sales lost to friction, including one buyer who waited out a checkout hiccup.

Card buyers spent roughly 2x more per order than cash buyers ($17.11 vs. $8.33). That demand moved seller storefronts to our next build priority.

The pop-up proves the transactional side. Closet engagement is still unmeasured, since we hadn’t instrumented usage tracking. Analytics for return visits and outfits created is the next infrastructure priority.

The biggest failure was sequencing, not design. With two engineers and a hard MVP deadline, analytics kept losing to core flows.

Cinched launched with proof that the transactional side works, but no way to know if the digital closet changes behavior: no return-visit rate, no outfit counts. I treated instrumentation as an add-on instead of scoping it into the MVP for the feature we were betting on.

I prioritized the styling side, treating buying and selling as infrastructure. The Austin pop-up changed my mind: watching $127.65 change hands made it clear real commerce was happening whether or not I’d designed for it.

User research tells you what people want to do. Watching real money move tells you what they’re already doing, and the second can override the first.