I follow Business of Fashion blog and have come across a particular post about a website built by a couple from Moscow called 'Look at Me' which has grown to be a very popular site that is relatively unheard of here.
“My girlfriend was bored. I tried to figure out how to entertain her, found an issue of Arena magazine and thought: why don’t we go out, take pictures of stylish people in the street and publish them on the Internet?” Vasily Esmanov
Recalling the moment in 2005 that would lead him, one year later, to found Lookatme.ru, a Russian website that’s probably the most powerful fashion site you’ve never heard of.
Officially founded in 2006, at a time when fashion blogs hadn’t yet caught on in Russia, Lookatme.ru took a typical street-style approach. Esmanov met and photographed much of Moscow’s creative crowd — young designers who now sell their collections in Europe and photographers who now have exhibitions in prominent Moscow galleries — asking them not only what they were wearing, but also what they were reading and listening to.Look At Me soon expanded beyond a style blog and into the realm of social networking. In 2007, the site launched an events service that functioned a lot like today’s Facebook events feature, letting users see what parties or concerts friends were attending. “Look At Me was a successful street-style and party reports blog at the time and Vasily thought he could develop a social media site based on that,” said Alexey Amyotov, Esmanov’s partner and now Look At Me’s CEO. “He knew almost every creative person in Moscow and he wanted them to contribute to the site and have their own social network.”
“We understood that to deliver we needed to hire designers and developers, but we had no money,” said Amyotov. “We approached a small, very cool and creative web-studio called Nimbler and offered them a share in the future project in return for their skills,” he continued.
Today, Lookatme.ru has grown into an influential media site focused on fashion, film, music and design, attracting 100,000 visits a day and 1.5 million unique visitors a month. There are Look At Me events and gallery shows, and registered users can contribute content and connect and communicate with other likeminded people.
