Common Ace is a curated one-stop shop marketplace for women's sneakers. Their vision is to cultivate and bridge the women’s communities of streetwear and fashion to inspire full creative expression - for women, by women.
We sat down with Founders and NeueHouse Members Sophia Chang and Romy Samuel for an inside look into their latest venture, Common Ace.
What is the genesis story behind this project?
We met at a sneaker event and instantly became best friends. Romy had moved from Australia recently to jumpstart her idea of creating an aggregated marketplace for womens sneakers. Powered by our immense professional and creative backgrounds in the industry we joined forces to create Common Ace, a curated one-stop shop marketplace for Womens sneakers. The two of us spent many months in and out the beautiful communal floors of NeueHouse Madison Square and Hollywood working tirelessly to bring this concept to life!
Common Ace is the first of its’ kind as far as one central location for womens only luxury sneakers. What led you to finding this niche marketplace?
As avid sneaker collectors ourselves, we were always very aware of the voids in the industry. Women have struggled for decades shopping for sneakers and even in the digital age, we’re still limited with options and trawling thru the interwebs to find what we’re looking for. As collectors ourselves and loud voices in the sneaker space, we wanted to create something for women by real women. Really venturing out to serve HER in every aspect, powered by authentic voices and real intentions to bridge the gap.
In a time when (everything!) is so noisy, how do you break through the culture?
Like any successful business, we’ve carved out our consumer and what she wants and fully dedicate our efforts to serve her needs. We know because we ARE “her”! The female streetwear market is constantly overlooked and underserved so we are here to offer a unique curated marketplace. Empowering women with variety and accessibility we are pioneering the change we want to see, and this is just the beginning!
The bit in the Forbes article that says “Common Ace is an online destination where a woman’s user experience is considered first,” is very intriguing. Can you explain more about this?
As women we joke about our shopaholic behaviors whether it’s buying more than one color if we can’t decide, buying in multiples then returning, buying emotionally, buying and feeling naughty… the list goes on! We laugh about it but this is powerful information from a design perspective. Romy and I are huge fans of neuroscience, cognitive behavior cycles and human biology. There’s plenty of great science we can dig into and marry with design to empower our female shoppers. There are also numerous studies that display the drastic differences between men and women brains and how we shop. We are leaning into the scientific approach and using the power of design — user interface and user experience — to strategically strengthen our website build so we can best cater to our audience.
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