When Tinder Meets Uber- For the Modeling Industry

Welcome to my first blog post for e-business. I don't want to bore you right off the bat, but I also want to make sure that you know the nitty-gritty of what common theme to expect among the many more future posts to come. I love the fashion and beauty industries (original for a girl, I know), but what I love even more is understanding how tech and anything digital are shaping these industries and changing the way traditional business models operate. And even more specifically, how the e-commerce and digital marketing scene works in the businesses of these two industries. Let's get started, shall we? 

It’s not every day that you have a friend excitedly sending you an article on Facebook saying “OMG your ex-boss is on Business of Fashion!”, but that’s exactly what happened a few days ago. I interned at a modeling agency in New York called Silent Models last summer and little did I know that one of the intern duties of testing out a new app my boss was secretly developing would one day become one of the headline articles in BoF’s “Fashion-Tech” section. 

When I first played around with Swipecast, identifying bugs and weaknesses of the UI, the app idea intrigued me a lot. While the app’s current analogy is “Uber for models”, as detailed in the article, I bet few people know that it started out more with the concept of “Tinder for models”. In the earlier concept, the idea was to have models upload their profiles and for casting agents to swipe through models looking for work, much like how users of Tinder do based on judgments of appearances. It was extremely interesting for me to see how this initial idea was eventually adopted to the current “Uber for models” approach whereby models upload a portfolio and casting agents filter them based on preferences such as height and hair colour, and can send booking requests, much like how you would send one for an Uber driver. 

The UI of Swipecast

With the emergence and fast-paced growth of social media and disruptive technologies to support and even become the primary platform of many traditional businesses and e-businesses, it really makes me reflect on the growing impact of technology on multisided platforms, and how this creates new business opportunities that could never exist years ago. With apps like Swipecast, aspiring models can easily gain more exposure and job opportunities while budget-tight fashion brands have more options in economically casting their campaigns. 

However at the same time, it is also clear that this kind of technology can’t completely replace the human interactions required in booking big modeling jobs. There are still many key considerations such as the level of accountability or the model’s ability to move and interact on set. 

At the end of the day, I think examples like Swipecast in fashion industry push us to deeply consider, to what extent mobile technology can change the ways traditional business models work, and shift work to a more digital basis without jeopardizing the value of human interactions.

Link to the article: http://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/fashion-tech/modelling-apps-swipecast-feels-instagram