bedeviled mojo slop

Back when the Internet was young and you could sell anything and everything Internet-related, there was a company, Skim.com. Salon.com profiled them in an article called "Stalker chic". So, what about Skim.com?

Skim.com markets personalized I.D.-tagged clothing: jackets and shirts and bags and skirts, each one individually marked with a unique number and the skim.com URL. Each I.D. number, in turn, correlates to a skim.com e-mail address. If someone sends a note to your I.D. number, it will be forwarded to your skim.com e-mail address. Your clothes are, essentially, telling everyone how to get in touch with you without revealing exactly who you are. As skim.com co-founder Johne Eisenhut describes the concept behind the clothing: "The brands and individualized products you choose communicate something about you, your style and aesthetics, to the outside world. We wanted to find a way to make that communication two-way."

Awesome idea I thought at the time. Apparently the idea was maybe too ahead of its time because Skim.com is nothing more than a Webmail service at this point. And that's unfortunate because some of their clothing was really well designed. I own one of their jackets. At this point it's like a dot-com collector's item

Skim.com's clothing is marketed for what the company's founders call the "urban citizens" of the world, successful young creative types -- artists, graphic designers, Web producers, writers, filmmakers, etc. -- with a bit of money to burn and appreciation of Gucci but an eye on the gutter. (A quick peek at the staff of skim.com reveals a parade of impossibly attractive, confident-looking hipsters who seem to have stepped straight off the jet from their latest jaunt to a hot new club in Reykjavik, Iceland.) The idea is, apparently, that there's an elite insider circle of fashionistas who share similar high/low aesthetics -- an international demographic that might wear a $400 pair of Helmut Lang pants with a vintage T-shirt that they picked up at a thrift store and the latest Adidas trainers.

So, it got me thinking ... especially the two-way communication bit and this whole social software thing ... what with weblogs and AIM and ubiquitous communication and all ... could you possibly revive Skim.com or start a new company as a social clothier in 2005?

Instead of tying a personalized I.D.-tagged piece of clothing to a static e-mail address at Skim.com, why not allow the customer to re-purpose the ID to point to a social software service. The social software service would allow you to tie that personalized ID into your Friendster, LinkedIn, or whatever circle. It'd be some other dimensionality by which you make relations between people. I know this person because of their jacket and I know this person because of their belt. I'm not sure yet how you'd limit the amount of information you'd share initially. But the ID would tie into ways of contacting you. So, let's say you're at a party and someone spots you with an ID'd shirt and they send a text message to the ID, well then maybe if you've got a registered text message-enabled cell phone, it passes on the message. You could certainly have other means by which you let the service notify you. Also, you could have different articles of clothing tied into different circles. Maybe your brand new suit ties you into your professional circle of contacts but your leather choker ties you into ... ummmmmmm ... or is that ties you up?

It's crazy enough that it might work. I think I've got a good business model in mind, I just need to noodle on that for a bit.