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Chicago-based StyleSeek is a men's fashion site that generates clothing recommendations based on users' tastes. Co-founder and CEO Tyler Spalding is a rocket scientist who worked on space shuttle equipment for NASA and Lockheed Martin Corp., then left for the startup world after deciding his favorite part of the job was tackling big problems as part of a small team.SAXO BANK Cycling 

StyleSeek launched this summer and has about 15,000 users, although visitors to StyleSeek.com are still asked to submit a request for membership. To bypass this process, do a Web search for “StyleSeek DNA” and you can enter the site through a virtual back door; from there,Castelli Cycling you can create an account. 

Mr. Spalding tells Crain's contributor Steve Hendershot more about the company. 

Crain's: How does a rocket scientist go about developing a menswear site? Explain the process you followed in developing StyleSeek. 

Tyler Spalding: Menswear has been relatively untapped for a very long time. There's extremely low competition, and it's really, really fragmented. We wanted to understand why this was not the hot space. It was 25 percent of what the women's (fashion market) was. But it was also harder because there are fewer men who are exploratory and want a product like this. 

The initial idea was to get male influencers to share what clothing they had, kind of like a digital closet, and say, “Here's exactly the stuff that he wears.” And then allow people to find more things like that. 

We talked to people and heard that menswear e-commerce was going to become a fast-growing segment. That more and more men are really caring about this, and in a year or three years there will be a lot more men making this market a lot more exciting. Thankfully, all that stuff came true. Menswear e-commerce is the No. 1 growing segment in the entire world right now. The growth is just absolutely absurd. 

From there, we tried to understand why men buy clothing online and why they don't. Then we looked at it from the retailing perspective to see if retailers care about this,Garmin Cycling and if they see menswear as something that's challenging for them. The result was a resounding yes, that they spend a lot of time and money trying to draw in male customers, and it's a becoming a greater part of their business, but it's hard to bring qualified male traffic to their sites. So we knew that there was a need there. 

Then it was all about trying to build a product for men that didn't already exist, and that men would be excited about. We needed to build an experience that they could use, and that was even a little bit fun.RadioShack Cycling 

We asked guys, "How do you know that what you're wearing is actually socially acceptable and that people aren't laughing at you?" It turns out they look around in social situations; if they're in business school, they go to class and look around and see the people there and mimic the (prevailing) style. That was huge, that replicative behavior. It was real-world style; guys didn't watch movies or read magazines to try to figure out aspirational looks; they started at a much lower level, and that was something we didn't expect. It gave us a starting point featuring real clothing. From there we built a Pandora-like algorithm and did a lot of testing, learning different items that sort of cluster together. That feedback led us to refine it into something that people end up using. 

The way it works is that a user will come to the site and go through our style game where they select images of lifestyle choices, things that aren't necessarily related to fashion, like cars, movies, magazines. Then we then build up a style profile for you similar to (a Pandora music channel) and then you get matched to reviews, blogs, products and brands that are 100 percent personalized for you. We also introduce you to small brands that you wouldn't typically have exposure to, and if you're reading about a new jacket, we'll link to the actual jacket so you can buy it. 

We'll also show alternatives,Specialized Cycling so if you see Prada shoes and love them but the price is outside your range, we'll show you why they're great and why they cost $1,000. But we can show you other shoes that are stylistically almost identical — maybe uses a different material — or we'll show you the "Made in the USA" version.