Stylit

I'm really excited to share this new online styling service I found a few months ago! Do you like fashion (even a little)? Do you like surprises? Do you like free things? Of course you do! Then I think you'll really like Stylit. 

Stylit is a free personal styling service that delivers 6 different outfit ideas to your email each Thursday. Signup is required, but it's completely free and takes just a minute. You can even sign in with your Facebook to make it easier. 

Once you enter your basic info, it will lead you through filling out a "style profile." It shows you a series of outfits and asks you what is MOST like your style. This was a really fun process and I had to stop and think about quite a few of them. I wish you could be a bit more specific, like picking individual pieces and assembling an outfit rather than just taking every single piece, but I understand why they had to do it this way.

I'm obviously pretty casual most of the time. There are 17 steps to the style profile. At first they are all pictures. Then you are asked your measurements (voluntary), favorite colors, trends you hate, etc. It was very thorough!

Yes, I am showing you my actual measurements and choices. Honesty, people...brutal honesty.

They even ask your budget for different categories.

Then, every Thursday you get an email with a link to your latest outfits. It always cheers me up to see them. And honestly, I really have looked back at some of them before I went shopping to get ideas. You can rate the outfits, pin them to Pinterest, or even click on them and be taken to the website where they're sold. (Stylit doesn't actually sell any of the items. They're sold on third-party websites like Amazon, Nordstrom, Old Navy, etc.)

Here are a few of my recent ones:

Things I love about Stylit:

• Free fashion advice
• Most of the outfits are actually really decent. They aren't all "runway" looks that no real person ever actually wears.
• There are a wide range in prices. Sometimes a shirt might be $40 and sometimes it might be $120. It works great for all budgets!
• The clothes are from a variety of retailers, some that I've never heard of.
• Pinterest integration
• I don't have to go search for the item like I might if I saw it on a random website. I just click on it and I'm taken right there.
• Easy to use interface (Really! It's idiot-proof!) that's clean and clutter-free
• The only emails they send are the weekly outfit notifications. You're not bombarded with spam.

Things I wish would be changed/improved:

• I wish you could rate individual items in an outfit collection. Sometimes I love half of the outfit and not the other half. I don't feel great about giving it 3 stars, when I really love a few things. this frustrates me.
• The outfits tend to be rather girly. It's great for many women, but I know that many tomboy/androgynous/sporty women feel rather left out by this. If there was an option that allowed for more inclusive styling, that would be excellent.
• Even though I have rated things low before, similar outfits show up still. This isn't a major thing, and maybe it will get better with time.

As you can see, the positive WAY outweighs the negative. What do you think. Will you try it out?

Disclaimer: The opinions in this review are completely my own. I was not paid or compensated in anyway for this review. Membership on the site is free. I'm simply sharing this because it's a service I love.

Feedly Review

I don't know about you, dear blog readers, but I was devastated when Google Reader went to the big RSS party in the sky. How on earth would I efficiently spend 3 hours on the couch in my pajamas reading about the lives of people I'd never met? To be honest, my time reading blogs decreased quite a bit. I just never found a great alternative. 

Enter: Feedly.

Their slogan is "Read More. Know More." Simple, direct, and nerdy. How could you not love it? 

I am probably late to the game on this, but I just discovered Feedly. It's is a free RSS service that organizes all of the blogs you read into one place. That's a MILLION times better than trying to remember all of the blogs you like and having to individually peruse their sites. It's also way better, in my opinion, than getting 400 emails in your inbox. You can read from the web or using their free apps. They're available for Apple and Android devices (but I can only speak for the Apple side of things).

Personally, I enjoyed reading on their iPad much more than I did on the web service. The iPad app presents the posts in each category in a magazine or "tile" format. It's really appealing to the eye, and easy to pick exactly what you want to read without scrolling through a million posts. (Yes, that IS my blog you see in there. I subscribed to it so I can see what my readers see. Lame? Perhaps. Useful? Definitely.) When you're done reading a post, you simply swipe it away to go to the next.