Monday, April 21, 2008

Shooting for the 100K

Project Einstein says clothes buying isn't rocket science

By Brendan Lynch

Project Einstein might sound like a relativity experiment, but the MIT $100K Business Plan Competition web/IT semifinalist shares more in common with some Jerry Seinfeld routines.

What Pandora Media Inc. does for music or Netflix Inc. does for movies, Project Einstein proposes to do for clothes: It is a recommendation-based website for men shopping online for clothing, CEO Will O'Brien said.

"Men hate to shop for clothes," O'Brien said. "In stores, they like to get in and get out."

A simple, interactive user interface would help men stock their wardrobes, making recommendations based on past purchases and profile information. The team also includes stylists, who would help keep users in fashion.

The site would make money by collecting 5 percent to 10 percent on transactions from clothes retailers linked through the website. The online clothing market for men aged 18 to 24 was $3 billion last year, according to O'Brien.

O'Brien, who has worked for Priceline.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp., and COO Bob Meese, who has worked for Google Inc. and venture firm Boston Millennia Partners, are both second-year students at MIT's Sloan School of Management. O'Brien and Meese are bootstrapping the company while they look for seed funding and build the site's beta version, which they hope to launch in Q3 of this year.

The site takes its name from a story often told about Albert Einstein: He supposedly owned several copies of the same suit to better spend time that would have been wasted picking out clothes, something that inspired O'Brien.

"I'm a frustrated consumer of apparel," O'Brien said.