The company is the latest start-up to go after the content-sharing craze, fueled by Pinterest, which allows its members to “pin” images, videos and other objects to their pinboard.

In the same way, StyleSaint allows users to publish and share digital collages of clothing and apparel and to create “tear sheets,” using industry lingo. The collages are formed by pulling together photos and stories from around the Web.

What sets StyleStaint apart from Pinterest and other pure-play content-sharing sites is that this fall it will start designing and manufacturing its very own apparel brand based on the user-generated collections.

StyleSaint officially launched today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, but AllThingsD has the details on its funding round, which closed last year.

The company was founded by Allison Beal, who says she’s been obsessed with making “tear sheets” and “style books” since the age of 13. The other co-founders are CEO Brian Garrett, a veteran entrepreneur in the Los Angeles area, and Brian Weitman, who will be the company’s manufacturing partner and is the CEO of STC/QST and president of WTS Los Angeles, which produces Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen’s runway collection among other clothing lines.

Since Pinterest hit it big, raising $100 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, other sites have conveniently been claiming that they are like Pinterest but with an e-commerce twist.

Pinterest doesn’t actually sell anything directly to consumers, but it is widely known for driving major traffic to e-commerce sites. Other sites like OpenSky are trying to create the same sense of community by selling items that are sourced and shared by celebrities and other experts who add an editorial and recommendation-driven component to the site.

Joining StyleSaint’s advisory board is Brian Lee, founder of ShoeDazzle; Kate Ciepluch, former creative director of Shopbop; Irene Au, Google’s head of global design; Jimmy Yaffe, co-CEO of Fuel M+C; Brett Brewer, co-founder of Intermix Media; and Soraya Darabi, co-founder of Foodspotting.

Here’s a glimpse into the company’s style via its promo video:

Threadflip is a new marketplace coming out of private beta today that is making it insanely easy to sell used clothes, shoes, jewelry and other accessories online.

The secret to the San Francisco company is that it handles all of the hard work for you.

For example, once an item sells, Threadflip figures out the shipping costs, finds the correct box, and sends it to your door. Its “White Glove Service” goes one step further. For those willing to send their items to Threadflip, the company takes care of the rest by photographing, listing, pricing and ultimately shipping the item if it sells.

Threadflip is also announcing today that it has raised $1.6 million in a seed round led by First Round Capital and Baseline Ventures. Other participants include Dave Morin from Slow Ventures, Forerunner Ventures, Greylock Discovery Fund and Andreessen Horowitz Seed Fund.

The site takes a 15 percent cut of the transaction, which includes the box and shipping costs. Threadflip’s White Glove Service is still in a limited pilot, and is experimenting with a tiered model that ranges between 40 percent and 50 percent.

So far, the site has attracted higher-end items, with an average sale price of $50 to $60. That means more Prada and less Old Navy (although there’s some of that, too).

Manik Singh, founder and CEO of Threadflip, argues that other solutions for selling used clothes online, like eBay, require some technical expertise and a lot of time. This one was designed with his wife in mind, who never bothered to resell an expensive pair of boots, even though she never wore them.

“You never have to leave the house,” Singh said. “When we launched [in beta], women loved it, because it eliminated two barriers: ease of uploading and shipping. We remove both of those barriers.”

While in beta, Singh said, a third of users visited the site every day to share an item, “like” an item, or buy something. The women who have gravitated to the site the most are between the ages of 22 and 35; they enjoy blogging and writing about fashion, including taking photos of all of their outfits and posting them on Facebook.

That behavior drove Threadflip to create a feature that allows women to post photos directly from their Facebook accounts. “They might take a photo of a dress and post it on Facebook, and then in six months, when the dress is out of style, you don’t want to take a new photo. It’s a heavily used feature,” Singh said.

Because the sellers are often amateur fashion bloggers or other like-minded people, the pages often look like a magazine, featuring images of models wearing the clothes, rather than a snapshot of a pair of pants laid out on a kitchen table.

The concept represents a huge shift in the way women shop for clothes. Currently, women’s sizes are based on standards created in the 1940s, said Christina Wallace, Quincy Apparel’s co-founder and CEO. But Wallace said a lot has changed. Women are taller and there are a larger variety of shapes.

Most importantly, “we are definitely bustier,” she said.

The idea for creating a new line of clothing, based on bra size and sold over the Internet, came after Wallace and her co-founder Alex Nelson graduated and were shopping for business suits.

“We were both misfits, but the more we talked to friends, we found that everyone considered themselves to be a misfit,” she said. “If no one can wear these clothes, our bodies aren’t the problem.”

Traditionally, men buy suits based on their inseam and waist size and have jackets tailored to fit their shoulders and arm length. In contrast, women buy suits off the rack in dress sizes, and are rarely offered tailoring as part of the sale.

The result is poorly fitting clothes. Jackets and blouses ride up, don’t provide enough coverage, gape at the chest, or fall flat because of extra room.

“Men are astounded that this is how women’s clothes are sized,” Wallace said. “I don’t know a single man who hasn’t had a suit tailored to fit him.”

Last week, the site started selling five different jacket varieties, ranging from a two-button sandstone blazer to a more hip burnt orange one-button wool jacket. For now, inventory is limited while the company gets off the ground. It has plans to expand soon to blouses, dresses, pants and skirts.

The clothes are sewn in New York City and are sold in a variety of sizes, such as 38-C/D Tall or 32-A Short. If women aren’t particularly sure of their bra size, there’s a short questionnaire that helps confirm which size you should order.

Wallace said they have raised an undisclosed amount of capital in a seed round, but generally had a hard time getting the attention of venture capitalists.

“I think it has been interesting to raise for this,” Wallace said. “We are going to middle-aged investors who don’t get the market. They go ask their wives, who haven’t been in our market for awhile, and so there’s been some questioning as to whether this is a problem or a need. We need to launch and show the need.”

EMarketer predicts that the apparel and accessories category is expected to grow by 20 percent to $40.9 billion this year, up from $34.2 billion in 2011.

That beats the sale of books, music and videos, which have historically been considered the most dominant e-commerce categories — those are now expected to grow by only 18 percent to $20.4 billion this year.

The report published by the Internet market research firm today is the first time it has broken down its forecasts by category.

EMarketer attributed the gains in apparel to retailers’ improved methods for displaying products online that make purchasing clothes, in particular, less of a guessing game.

Some of the visual innovations are stunning.

For instance, Amazon.com’s MyHabit, a private sales clothing site, produces animated videos of models wearing the clothing for sale. The representations are so realistic, the fabric sways as the model struts and turns as if walking down a catwalk.

On the more whimsical side of innovations is eBay’s augmented reality app that allows users to “try on” a pair of sunglasses by layering them over a picture of their face.

But in addition to new display technology, there are also many more apparel sites for consumers to choose from. Over the last two years, the idea of private sales or flash sales — offering expensive, high-end fashion at steep discounts — has spread like wildfire.

Free shipping also plays a role since it removes some of the risk for consumers: If they don’t like a shirt or pair of pants, they don’t have to pay a fee for delivery back to the retailer.

Overall, the report is predicting another big year for e-commerce. It expects U.S. retail sales to grow 15.4 percent to $224.2 billion in 2012, which is higher than eMarketer’s previous forecast that called for e-commerce to grow 11.3 percent to $209.3 billion in 2012.

The biggest category in 2012 is expected to be computer and consumer electronics, which have a higher price point, and are expected to bring in a total of $48.6 billion.

Wittlebee, a monthly kids’ clothing club that was incubated at Los Angeles area “technology studio” Science, has gotten $2.5 million in funding.

Much like another Science start-up, Dollar Shave Club, Wittlebee ships a custom box of high-quality kids’ clothes to members.

The seed round of funding was led by Rincon, with participation from SoftTech, Google Ventures, Matt Coffin, Crosslink, and Morado.

Wittlebee’s CEO and founder Sean Percival said the money would be used to create a private-label clothing line.

Wittlebee uses stay-at-home parents, who have used the site, as customer service reps. The start-up sends a new order of children’s apparel each month, including onesies, t-shirts, leggings, socks and pants, upping the sizes as the kid grows.

In other words, kind of like a never-ending online Gap.

Here’s the official press release on Wittlebee’s funding:

Wittlebee Raises $2.5 Million Seed Funding Lead By Rincon

Children’s clothing membership service to begin manufacturing private label designs to keep up with growing customer demand

Los Angeles, CA. April 4, 2012 — Wittlebee (www.Wittlebee.com), the affordable children’s clothing monthly membership service backed by technology studio Science Inc., today announces the company raised $2.5 million in seed funding leady by Rincon, with participation from SoftTech, Google Ventures, Matt Coffin, CrossLink, and Morado. Jim Andelman, co-founder and General Partner at Rincon, joins Wittlebee’s board alongside Michael Jones, founder and CEO of Science, and Sean Percival, Wittlebee’s founder and CEO.

Since launching less than two months ago, Wittlebee has experienced accelerated growth, in part because of Science’s track record of quickly scaling ecommerce businesses. The company will use the new investment to build out its executive team and user acquisitions.

Upon joining Wittlebee, customers are connected to a team of mom stylists who work with families to compose boxes of high-quality children’s clothing to meet individual children’s needs. Active kids in warm climates like Miami may receive appropriate t-shirts, shorts and socks whereas infants in Albany receive long-sleeve onesies and cozy pajamas.

“Wittlebee’s recent growth has been tremendous,” said Percival. “Our customer feedback is overwhelmingly positive; we are speaking to an audience of 20,000 highly engaged moms across social media who tell us they’re delighted we’re saving them time and money for all their children’s clothing needs. We plan to use Rincon’s investment to create Wittlebee’s private label clothing line that will truly showcase our commitment to high-quality practical children’s apparel.”

In the coming months, customers will receive a selection of parents’ favorite well-known brands in addition to Wittlebee’s private label. Manufactured both locally in Los Angeles and abroad, the new line represents customers’ wish-list of kids’ must-haves, from high-quality soft fabrics, to a wide color palate, to unique graphic designs. After months of research and testing apparel options through Wittlebee’s social networks, the resulting Wittlebee bespoke label will be a timeless array of apparel basics to carry kids through seasons, activities and all their lifestyle needs.

“For every investment decision we make, we care most about customer value proposition, team, and business model,” said Jim Andelman, Managing Partner at Rincon. “We’ve been tremendously impressed by parents’ positive response to Wittlebee’s offering: they love the selections, they save money and you can’t beat the convenience of clothes showing up right to your door. The e-commerce space is exploding in LA, and we’re very excited to be at the forefront with Wittlebee.”

For more on Wittlebee, please visit www.Wittlebee.com.

The fairly high-profile start-up, which was co-founded by Kim Kardashian and raised $40 million from Andreessen Horowitz, got its start as a subscription service.

For $40 a month, women would receive a pair of shoes, based on their preferences.

The catch, however, was that if you failed to log in and tell ShoeDazzle that you weren’t interested that month, they would charge you anyway. The model was reminiscent of mail-order CD clubs that drew you in with the offer of 10 albums for one cent, but then signed you up for a monthly shipment unless you opted out in advance.

Under the changes announced today, ShoeDazzle members will only be charged if and when they make a purchase — no matter if it is once a month or once every six months.

Everything else remains the same, so members will continue getting an email offering a monthly selection of shoes, selected according to their personal preferences. The shoes will also continue to be made specifically for ShoeDazzle from a variety of manufacturers in China.

Without the commitment of  having to log in every month, the site could appeal to a wider audience. Today, ShoeDazzle has 10 million members, up from three million a year ago.

“But that isn’t enough,” Strauss said in an interview. “We want tens of millions.”

As part of the changes, ShoeDazzle will also add new categories to the site, including apparel and lingerie in addition to shoes, and some handbags.

“The feedback that we’ve been getting is that when they see the shoes on the model, they want to buy the whole outfit,” Strauss said. “We want to increase our share of the closet.”

Six months ago, Strauss joined ShoeDazzle from Provide Commerce, where he was CEO. Provide Commerce is known for operating sites such as ProFlowers and RedEnvelope. ShoeDazzle’s founder, Brian Lee, is now chairman. In addition, Kardashian, who helped launch ShoeDazzle, is playing a less active role in the company today, but continues as a spokeswoman.

In the past seven months, Fab has grown rapidly, registering 1.65 million users, who have purchased 750,000 products.

It now plans to grow even faster, with the help of this acquisition.

Both companies have a similar mission: To bring independent artists and craftsmen, who make aesthetically appealing and sometimes out-of-the ordinary items, to a large marketplace.

Fab.com does this mostly for home decor, and New York-based FashionStake does it mostly for fashion and apparel. The sites have the flavor of a Gilt Groupe, which sells high-end fashion at a discount, except they offer more undiscovered brands, at more reasonable prices.

In a blog post, Fab CEO Jason Goldberg said FashionStake co-founders Vivian Weng and Daniel Gulati will join the Fab company.

Goldberg did not disclose terms of the deal, but it’s possible that he tapped into a large cash reserve, which includes a $40 million round of capital raised last month from Andreessen Horowitz and others.

FashionStake, which launched in September 2010, has received investments from a number of players, including Battery Ventures, Forerunner Ventures and Gilt Groupe co-founder Alexis Maybank.

Last year, FashionStake acquired Moxsie, another retailer of independent fashion.

Ryan called AllThingsD this morning to clear the air after a report in BetaBeat painted a fairly grim picture of the situation.

BetaBeat reported this morning that as many as 170 employees would be laid off today; that Gilt Taste, the company’s high-end grocery site, was likely to be closed down; and that Jetsetter, its travel operations, was likely to be merged with Gilt City, its daily deal division.

On pretty much all accounts, Ryan declared not guilty.

“We are not closing down any businesses. We are not closing down Gilt Taste, and we aren’t merging Gilt City and Jetsetter,” he said.

Additionally, another new division, Park & Bond, which sells full-priced men’s clothing, is also doing well. “In its fifth month of business, Park & Bond did more revenue than any other business in its fifth month,” Ryan added.

The one grain of truth in all of it, he said, is that over the next couple of months, he expects to selectively trim staff by roughly 50 employees.

But for emphasis, he added, the company will still end up having more employees by the end of March than it does now.

“It’s pretty minimal in the scheme of having 900 employees,” he said. “Not only will we do that [have cutbacks], but we will continue to do that. What Gilt needs to be, and is doing, is to create a fantastic consumer experience while running an efficient company.”

He said the company achieved its goal of generating $500 million in June and now is setting its sights on transitioning the business from a money-losing organization to cash-flow break even this year.

He also said that Gilt Groupe, which raised $138 million in capital last May, is on track for an IPO, perhaps as early as the fourth quarter, but more likely in 2013.

“The timing feels about right, and we are on a steady progression,” said Ryan, who declined to give revenue estimates for this year because the company is in the sensitive lead-up to a public offering.

Ryan named two divisions that may see cuts over the next couple of months: Gilt Taste and Gilt City.

In October, Gilt City purchased BuyWithMe, and although it hired only 20-25 of the deal provider’s 190 employees, Ryan said they probably don’t need that many going forward now that the integration has been completed.

Additionally, he said there are some inefficiencies within Gilt Taste.

Ryan characterized the site as “doing great,” but said it will need fewer staffers now that it is up and running. At first, it needed to negotiate deals with dozens of vendors and shoot photos of the more than 1,000 products on the site.

Now that they’ve hit a baseline of items, they’ll probably add only a couple hundred new products a year, reducing the need for so much staff.

“There’s much less work to do there,” Ryan said. “With flash sales, you have to do that process every week, but in the full-priced business, there’s greater start-up costs. That’s part of the business.”

In particular, BetaBeat said Park & Bond President John Auerbach was likely to leave the company.

Ryan said there’s always the chance one of the top 15 executives could leave, whether it was their decision or the company’s, but that Auerbach is still working there as of now.

The forecast was included as part of the company’s first-quarter results released today.

In February, Nordstrom agreed to acquire four-year-old HauteLook, marking the department store’s first foray into online private sales. Such sales, also called flash sales, liquidate excess inventory by offering steep discounts to members who have signed up for daily email.

Nordstrom paid $180 million in stock for the company, which is now close to HauteLook’s annual sales. If the company meets certain performance goals, the transaction size could jump to as much as $270 million over time.

For Nordstrom, the revenue stream is fairly insignificant. In the first quarter, net sales for the department store totaled $2.23 billion, an increase of 12 percent compared with the same period in 2010.

The acquisition will also hit the company’s bottom line. Charges associated with the HauteLook acquisition, including stock-based compensation, reduced earnings per share in the first quarter by four cents, and is estimated to impact full-year results by about $0.20 a share.

Gilt Groupe, which is also in the flash sales business, announced earlier this week that it had raised $138 million in capital at a reported $1 billion valuation. It previously said it expected to record $500 million in revenues for its fiscal year ending in June.

Participants in the fifth round include the Japanese-based telecom conglomerate Softbank Group as well as Gilt’s previous investors, General Atlantic and Matrix Partners. Other new investors include: Goldman Sachs, New Enterprise Associates, Draper Fisher Jurvetson Growth, Pinnacle Ventures, TriplePoint Capital and Eastward Capital.

Softbank’s involvement is two-fold.

Not only will it be contributing $62.5 million of the round, which will all be going toward Gilt’s U.S. operations, it will also invest a smaller undisclosed amount into Gilt Groupe Japan. The two companies will each own 50 percent of the joint venture.

In all, Gilt has raised $240 million. The fifth round values the company at roughly $1 billion before the round is taken into account. The round was first reported in a regulatory filing last week.

Gilt’s CEO Kevin Ryan, who is known for being one of the first 20 employees at DoubleClick, launched the members-only site in November 2007. In roughly four years, the company has created a name for itself as the online destination for discounts on brand-name luxury items. Targeting affluent young professionals, the site lures consumers in with beautiful photography and creates a sense of urgency because the deals are gone once the inventory sells out.

In addition to selling men’s and women’s apparel, it has branched out into new markets, such as children and home decor. It has expanded into travel and local deals through its Jetsetter and Gilt City brands respectively. [Read our Q&A with Ryan here.]

The funding will go toward launching new verticals and making acquisitions to get into new markets. In the next couple of months, Gilt has committed to launching a gourmet food site and a full-priced men’s online retail apparel site, but others are also on their way.

Ryan said the round ended up being bigger than they expected and they could have easily raised up to $200 million. But there’s a delicate balancing act between raising enough and diluting the company too far.

“It will be great not to have to do this for a long time,” he said, adding that this will be the last time the company raises a private round.

The next step will be an initial public offering. ”At some point, but we have no specific plans. It’s not happening any time soon,” he said.

Softbank, which operates wireless and broadband networks in Japan and has investments in hundreds of companies–including Yahoo! Japan–will contribute other services and intangible property to help expand what Gilt has already started in Japan.

“It’s not that it wasn’t going well. We are the flash-sales leader in Japan, but when we started talking to them, it was clear that they would add value,” Ryan said. “We don’t need a partner, but we were convinced that they would add value and be a great partner. We are a leader, but we want to be a lot bigger and it’s sometimes hard to be as successful in Japan without a partner. I think that will help.”

To be sure, the round will be helpful in establishing Gilt from among the copycats flooding the market.

The company previously said its revenues would total up to $500 million for the fiscal year ending June 2011. Ryan would not provide an update on that figure, but said the overall company, which has 670 employees and 100 job openings, is not yet profitable.

Its business model is not too dissimilar to well-funded Groupon or LivingSocial. Other direct competitors, such as Rue La La and HauteLook, have recently been acquired by eBay and Nordstrom respectively. And in the past couple of weeks, one of its closest competitors, ideeli, raised $40 million in capital. E-commerce giant Amazon just began another direct competitor called MyHabit. Additionally, Vente Privée, the big French flash-sales site, which already has billions in revenues, is reportedly launching in the U.S. in the coming months with an announcement slated for this week.

Here’s the full press release:

Gilt Groupe, Inc. Announces $138 Million in New Funding
Accelerates Business in Japan with Establishment of Joint Venture with SOFTBANK

NEW YORK, NY, May 9, 2011 – Gilt Groupe, Inc., an innovative online shopping destination, today announced it has raised $138 million from new and current investors. The new financing will be used for various growth initiatives, including acquisitions, new business categories Gilt plans to launch, as well as the acceleration of growth in existing categories and geographies.

Participants in the financing round include SOFTBANK Group; Gilt Groupe’s previous investors, General Atlantic and Matrix Partners; as well as a syndicate of new investors including Goldman Sachs, New Enterprise Associates, Draper Fisher Jurvetson Growth, Pinnacle Ventures, TriplePoint Capital and Eastward Capital.

SOFTBANK Group, a Japanese telecommunications, internet and media conglomerate, has invested $62.5 million into Gilt Groupe. In addition to that investment, SOFTBANK Group has made additional contributions into Gilt Groupe Japan, of cash, services, and intangible property to establish a joint venture between the two companies, representing a 50% stake for SOFTBANK Group in that business. The other partners invested a total of $75.5 million into Gilt Groupe in the US.

“We are very excited about each of the partners we’ve chosen and the opportunities this financing creates as we continue to expand into additional categories as well as make strategic acquisitions to complement existing business lines,” said Kevin Ryan, Founder and CEO, Gilt Groupe, Inc.

In the next several months Gilt will launch a gourmet food site as well as a full-price men’s online retail store as the Company continues to expand beyond its original business of off-price apparel and accessories through the flash sales model. In November 2007, Gilt Groupe launched as an invitation-only site for coveted women’s apparel and accessories. Today, Gilt Groupe has added business lines in home (Gilt Home); children (Gilt Children); men’s apparel and gear (Gilt MAN); vacation travel (Jetsetter); local services and experiences (Gilt City), and has founded the leading flash-sale site in Japan (Gilt Groupe Japan).

“I am very excited to see further expansion of Gilt’s offerings to Japanese customers,” said Masayoshi Son, Chairman and CEO of SOFTBANK Group. “With our Internet technology and Gilt’s innovative service, we look forward to working together to bring the Japanese market to a new stage of online shopping.”

”In just a short amount of time Gilt has successfully brought the flash sale model to Japan as well as introduced local city experiences through the launch of Gilt City Japan,” said Peter Glusker, CEO, Gilt Groupe Japan. “This newly formed joint venture with SOFTBANK will allow us to expand our offerings in Japan at a faster rate as well as benefit from SOFTBANK’s unique set of assets and expertise in Japan.”

To date Gilt has secured over $270 million in total financing since establishing operations in November 2007.

About Gilt Groupe, Inc.

Gilt Groupe, www.gilt.com, is an innovative online shopping destination offering its million members special access to the most inspiring merchandise and experiences every day, many at insider prices. Gilt continually searches the world for the most coveted brands, including fashion for women, men and children, home décor, hotels and travel experiences on every continent, and unique activities in a growing list of cities and destinations. We believe that every day is an opportunity to inspire and be inspired.

Gilt Groupe Japan, www.gilt.jp, was launched in March 2009, and has established itself as the leading flash-sales site in Japan with over 600,000 members.

The new site at MyHabit.com offers up to 60 percent off top brands such as Doo.Ri, Elizabeth and James, Halston, and Vera Wang. Like other members-only sites, the merchandise will go on sale in the morning, and be available until the inventory sells out.

While you have to belong, it costs nothing to join, and in this case, users can sign up with their Amazon username and password.

The idea of flash sales sites is as trendy as a Coach clutch.

Last week, New York-based ideeli raised $41 million in a third round of capital. Ideeli and Gilt Groupe both offer discounts on brand name apparel. Other sites, such as One Kings Lane, has also raised a lot of cash to offer discounts on home decor. Other apparel sites include Rue La La, which is partially owned by eBay, and HauteLook, which was acquired recently by Nordstrom.

The launch of MyHabit is Amazon’s latest attempt to tap into the designer apparel market. It also operates independent sites, such as Endless.com, which is focused on shoes, and Shopbop.com, which sells designer shoes, clothing, bags and accessories at full price.

MyHabit will leverage some of Amazon’s regular perks, such as free shipping and returns. Orders eligible for return will receive credit redeemable from MyHabit, Amazon.com and Endless.com.

While operating a little like Amazon, the site looks entirely different aesthetically. Instead of a large inventory of items displayed by small thumbnail pictures, the merchandise on MyHabit is a small subset that’s presented with video that offers a 360-degree view of the clothing on live models.

New York-based Ideeli, which operates a members-only flash sales site aimed at the affluent, has raised a hefty $41 million in a third round of capital.

Similar to Gilt Groupe, Ideeli offers limited-time sales to its members in apparel, accessories, home, shoes, kids, travel and lifestyle categories. Most sales start in the afternoon and last 40 hours before they expire or the inventory is gone.

The round was led by Next World Capital with Cue Ball Capital, StarVest Partners, Constellation Growth Capital and Kodiak Venture Partners also participating. In total, the company has raised $64.8 million.

The company, founded by CEO Paul Hurley four years ago, said the equity will be used to support growth and expansion plans, including new categories, partnerships, technology initiatives, marketing campaigns and hiring.

With four million members, it claims to be the fastest-growing members-only shopping company.

Gilt Groupe, also based in New York, has not disclosed how many members it has, but as of about a year ago it said it had 3.5 million members. Gilt has raised close to $50 million with the last round coming in December. However, it’s been reported that it could be close to raising a much larger round totaling $100 million.

Both companies fit squarely in the niche of finding new channels to reach shoppers, who are lured in by deep discounts on a small “curated” set of items that fit with their lifestyle.

Other companies riding this wave include GSI Commerce-owned Rue La La, HauteLook, which was purchased by Nordstrom for up to $270 million in February, and One Kings Lane, which is focused on home decor and recently raised $23 million.

Exclusively.In, which launched in June and raised $2.8 million from investors such as Accel Partners, has launched Palaces to Paradise, a companion site to its retail site that will offer discounts on travel packages to Asia.

Travel has been an obvious niche vertical that other flash sales and daily deal sites have readily expanded into.

Gilt Groupe launched Jetsetter in September 2009, and already has two million people signed up to receive its deals by email. About two-thirds of the membership overlaps with the other Gilt sites. Other daily deals sites have expanded into travel, including LivingSocial’s Escapes and Overstock.com.

Just like its apparel site, Exclusively.In is focused on offering travel experiences from Asia. The four travel deals that are live on the site starting today are: A boutique hotel in Udaipur, Rajasthan; a jungle lodge located in Kanha National Park in India; a beachside resort in India; and a villa located in Koh Samui, Thailand.

As an example, the five-bedroom villa in Thailand, which sleeps 10 and includes a full-time Thai chef, normally costs $1,290 a night but has been marked down to $1,095. The deal will be available until May 31.

The first round of funding was led by Seattle’s Madrona Venture Group, known for its early investment in Amazon.com.

The small Vancouver, B.C.-based company was started in 2007 when two college students, Kyle Vucko and Heikal Gani, went hunting for a good suit. After being struck by the difficulties of sorting through the options, ranging from Hugo Boss to Men’s Wearhouse, the two college students determined that there must be a better way.

That’s when the idea for Indochino was formed.

He and his partner bought one-way tickets to Shanghai and identified home tailors who could sew a suit in 48 hours and ship it to the U.S. in two to three weeks–all for $300 to $500.

Three years later, Vucko spends a lot of time in a suit.

“It’s an occupational hazard. I’m from the West Coast, which is not a huge suit-wearing culture. I grew up wearing Birkenstocks,” said Vucko, 25, who dropped out of University of Victoria during his final year to start the company.

But now, there’s no turning back.

The company has 35 employees, has developed a significant supply chain (rather than the mom and pop tailors) and has offices in B.C. and Shanghai. It has 17,000-plus clients in 60 countries, and revenues have cracked seven figures with 200 to 300 percent annual growth.

The idea is fairly simple. Teach men how to take their own measurements via step-by-step videos. Let them order online from a number of selections. Ship the suit within three weeks. As incentive, it is sending out free tape measures for a limited time to people who follow them on Twitter and send a Tweet about Indochino.

If it doesn’t fit, there are three options: take it to a local tailor and they’ll refund you the cost to fix it, they’ll remake it, or you can return the suit and get your money back.

“We generally keep every customer that we get. The second suit is click, buy and repeat. From a business perspective, that’s where you make all of your money and margin. From a guy’s perspective, it saves them time and money. You don’t have to go back to the store. Buying online is faster than what it takes to go to a mall,” Vucko said.

Bonobos, which raised $18.5 million recently, is in a somewhat similar niche, although it doesn’t offer tailored clothing, just better fitting clothes. It’s also in the same vein as Milk & Honey, which ships custom high heels to women, or Gemvara, which claims to make user-generated jewelry and recently raised $15 million.

Sites like Gilt are supposedly exclusive discount fashion communities, but the reality is they will take anyone who will pay. Groupon, which just got Google to say it was worth as much as $6 billion and is on the verge of an investor valuation of $4.75 billion, is a glorified email list. Sure, users must swarm a deal to activate it, but that always happens. And users can share deals with their friends on Facebook and Twitter, earning referral rewards if they buy a deal.

Hitwise researcher Bill Tancer told me via email that only 8.3 percent of Groupon traffic comes from social media referrals. That’s compared to 24 percent of Groupon traffic coming from shopping and classifieds Web pages (as in, ads) and 13 percent from email sites.

Upstream traffic from social networks as a portion of total Groupon traffic declined 83 percent from Nov. 9 to Nov. 10. Tancer said the move from social networks to email reflects the shift of Groupon visitors from early adopters to mainstream users.

The thing is, as seen particularly in the gaming business, social may have the capacity to be an incredible multiplier for any industry. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said more than once that he thinks e-commerce will be one of the next big sectors to be disrupted by companies that are built to be social from the ground up.

Linking social with commerce is tricky. Besides user reviews and accounts, which have been around forever, much of social commerce is very basic.

For example, Amazon recently launched the most minimal of minimal Facebook integrations, recommending products based on opted-in users’ public “Likes” and giving gift suggestions for friends with upcoming birthdays. The Web retailer could have gone much deeper, by, for instance, automatically connecting Amazon users to their Facebook accounts or helping users tell friends about new items they have bought.

But that would have raised privacy hackles, as with previous Facebook initiatives, such as the discontinued Facebook Beacon effort or the current Instant Personalization program.

Some retailers are trying to sell things directly on Facebook, such as Delta Air Lines tickets and JCPenney apparel. I see the point of trying to capture users on the sites where they spend all their time, but it seems a little awkward.

Not to say Facebook isn’t already developing a burgeoning business in virtual e-commerce through its gaming partners that could eventually extend to real-world goods (although the margins would be much worse).

And, yes, there are all sorts of real-world deals you can access by playing the “mayor game” on a local social service like Foursquare.

Also on the start-up front, the collage community Polyvore arranges deals and creates tools to help its two million users influence fashion designers, and indie retailer Moxsie asks its Twitter followers to help it choose what items to sell.

There are also start-ups, like Payvment and Milyoni, that provide tools for Facebook storefronts. And the purchase-sharing platforms Blippy and Swipely are social commerce taken to the extreme.

While none of those are Groupon-scale businesses, there are many playing around with the potentially explosive combination of social and commerce.

One cool example of social commerce I just saw today was in a post by E.B. Boyd at Fast Company.

Tea Collection, a boutique children’s clothing maker, used the Facebook Like button to decide which of its selection of discontinued girls’ dresses to deeply discount. When a $59 dress was chosen by user Likes, it was discounted to $10. It quickly sold out at a loss, but additional purchases by customers brought in by the sale gave the company one of its biggest overall sales days ever.

Spurred by the release of a hot videogame and earlier-than-usual promotions on televisions, U.S. shoppers spent 6.1 percent more on electronics in the first half of November the month, through Nov. 14, than a year ago, according to a recent analysis from MasterCard SpendingPulse, a unit of MasterCard Advisors.

The new data, based on MasterCard SpendingPulse data, which reflect estimates on all payment forms, including cash and checks, comes days before Thanksgiving, the traditional kickoff to the holiday selling season, when consumers traditionally spend several hundred billion of dollars. Retailers count on holiday sales for as much as 40 percent of their annual sales and half their annual profits.

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This week I tested a solution that might have made my quest for boots a little simpler. Snipi, which became available as a free download from Snipi.com on Monday, helps you organize your online-shopping results by gathering, or “snipping,” product information from Web pages and saving the information to lists.

These lists are stored on your personalized Snipi page, where you can access them later. Snipi also can save photos and videos to lists. And it has a coordinating iPhone app that shows up-to-date versions of the lists created on the computer, so you can have them with you on the go.

The Snipi Toolbar collects and displays the user’s online research.

To do all this, you use the Snipi Toolbar, a horizontal window that pops up within your browser so you never have to navigate away from the site where you’re shopping. If you see an item you like, simply drag and drop an image of it into the toolbar, where details about the item — including its title, price and image — are automatically filled in. If the item was previously snipped by another Snipi user, a description box will be filled with whatever that person wrote or pasted in from the product page; you can fill in the box yourself, too.

Snipi has a partnership with Shopzilla Inc., so the Snipi Toolbar also has comparison shopping built in: It displays links to Web sites where your snipped product, or products like it, can be found at lower prices.

One of the big drawbacks to Snipi is that it currently works only as a browser plug-in with Mozilla’s Firefox, not Microsoft’s (MSFT) Internet Explorer or Apple’s (AAPL) Safari. Snipi says it plans to introduce versions of its toolbar — though less functional ones — for IE and Safari by early to mid-June. Even so, downloading and installing a browser plug-in isn’t yet a routine thing for most people. And often, people who use plug-ins forget to keep them up-to-date.

Another downside to Snipi is that its comparison-pricing feature failed with apparel. The feature only really worked when used with “hard goods” like electronics, which are sold at retailers that participate in price-comparison networks. Yet Snipi still makes pricing suggestions for clothing and shoes, however irrelevant. For example, when I snipped a $150 Banana Republic dress, a link to $16 eye shadow sold at Sephora.com appeared in the Price Compare column. To reduce confusion, Snipi shouldn’t make such suggestions for apparel.

A handy feature built into the Snipi Toolbar lets you immediately share items via email or post them on Facebook, Twitter or WordPress blogs. This would have been useful while I was shopping online for boots because I could have more quickly shared my finds with friends, rather than copying and pasting URLs into emails.

While browsing on BestBuy.com (BBY), I found a Sony (SNE) Cybershot DSC-W220 with 12 megapixels and a 4x zoom lens for $199. Selecting a small icon in the Firefox browser’s bottom right corner, I opened the Snipi Toolbar and created a “Digicams” list, including the Sony. Snipi suggested alternative prices for this camera, including $159 for the same thing on Amazon.com (AMZN).

I got an early start on bathing-suit shopping by browsing Web sites for J. Crew, Victoria’s Secret and Macy’s. As expected, the price-comparison suggestions didn’t make sense. For one $58 Victoria’s Secret bathing suit, Snipi suggested a list of alternatives, including a $170 Kohler shower door, $203 Giorgio Armani glasses and an $82 corded telephone. I assure you that the bathing suit looked nothing like any of those items.

Confusing alternatives aside, I liked using the Snipi Toolbar as a place to gather my online research. It displayed images of items neatly lined up in a row, and when I selected an item, the description appeared. Someone like my sister, who is planning a wedding, might enjoy using the Snipi Toolbar for saving photos of various locations in a list she could call “Wedding Venues.” She could then share the entire list with me in one step. Or she could go visit some of the places and bring an iPhone with the Snipi app to see her list.

I tried the iPhone app, and it was a cinch to tap My Lists to see the online research I’d gathered. Here, as on the browser toolbar, visuals make it easy to glance through many products.

The toolbar can save various lists that you name and categorize into Shop, Photos or Videos, and these can be kept private, shared with friends or made public. Public lists are seen by all other users on Snipi.com, which is also a social-networking site. I wouldn’t use it as such, because I already rely on other social-networking outlets, but some people might.

Snipi, which uses a guessing algorithm to fill in details like a product’s price, says its toolbar will improve as more people use it. If you do a lot of research or online shopping or you simply want an online tool for saving images and videos from the Web, Snipi will work well for you. Its price-comparison suggestions need some improvement, but I felt more organized after using the Snipi Toolbar for a week’s worth of browsing.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://solution.allthingsd.com

Unfazed by a market littered with the shattered remains of previous online wine retailers, Amazon (AMZN) is expected to begin selling by early October. Which is great news for direct-to-consumer wine sellers, who are certain to benefit from Amazon’s support. “Amazon isn’t the first company to sell wine over the Internet, but they have a lot of pull in the online market as the world’s largest online retailer,” Terry Hall of The Napa Valley Vintners Association told the E-Commerce Times. “That’s the exciting part. Consumers will get access to all those wines. It gives consumers a greater choice in what they can purchase, and gives wineries another venue to get their products out to consumers.”

Unfazed by a market littered with the shattered remains of previous online wine retailers, Amazon (AMZN) is expected to begin selling by early October. Which is great news for direct-to-consumer wine sellers, who are certain to benefit from Amazon’s support. “Amazon isn’t the first company to sell wine over the Internet, but they have a lot of pull in the online market as the world’s largest online retailer,” Terry Hall of The Napa Valley Vintners Association told the E-Commerce Times. “That’s the exciting part. Consumers will get access to all those wines. It gives consumers a greater choice in what they can purchase, and gives wineries another venue to get their products out to consumers.”