Styletag Makes Shopping Your Instagram Feed Easy

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Every Monday is Cyber Monday! Welcome to our new weekly series that highlights the fashion and retail apps emerging from the Bay Area.

We all know Instagram offers an endless stream of fashion eye candy. And one photo can easily trigger an all-night, Internet goose chase to track down that dress you have to have. It should be a veritable goldmine for brands and shoppers. But with Instagram blocking direct links in posts, one-click, seamless shopping isn't possible directly from the platform. So app developers are scrambling to bridge this gap. The recently-relaunched Styletag may finally have found the magic formula.

SK Planet, Inc., with headquarters in South Korea and a U.S. base in SF's SOMA, released Styletag in early 2012 during New York Fashion Week. The original version didn't incorporate Instagram and attempted to attract users as a standalone app. But in a saturated market, that approach didn't work. So the company pulled the app to reconfigure it to fit the U.S. market.

Almost two years later and the app has reappeared, now with a roster of big fashion names as content contributors. Miranda Kerr, Nicole Richie, and Song of Style's Aimee Song (just to name a few) are uploading photos and tagging the items for easy, one-click buying. A snag in the process is the jump from Instagram to Styletag. Users can go straight the Styletag app to troll outfits. But it's more likely that a photo on Instagram will trigger the jump over to this complementary app to quickly find the coveted items online.

There are still issues to work out. For example, Nicole Richie's photo of her silk-striped Balmain pants links to UK shopping site Stylebop that only offers the pants in black (not in stripes). And Miranda Kerr's Styletag app reads more like her personal (sponsored) wish list rather than displaying her own, everyday wardrobe. The style bloggers are the ones who shine, uploading loads of content and syncing the photos across multiple platforms (blog, Instagram, Styletag).

This is an app to download (for iPhone and for Android) for ease of shopping street style trends that are sold online. It's also for Instagram users who are constantly asked where they shop. It won't replace Instagram. But it can help get that obsession-inducing outfit spotted on your feed into your closet by the end of the week.
· Styletag App [Official Site]
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