Our beautiful (and oh-so-talented) Contributor Laura LaFrance @miss_lafrance is a Fashion Designer by day, and entrepreneur by night! She is the Founder and Editor of House of La France Magazine - “a magazine for the emerging, by the emerging”. I
n her latest Spring/Summer 2022 edition, she has interviewed our very own, Sarah Neill! Read on for a powerful conversation between two incredible, inspiring, and women.

This article was first published in House of La France Magazine, Spring/Summer 2022

What prompted the Mys Tyler Revolution? It is such a great platform for anyone in the fashion and beauty industry to explore other people’s style. Is there a story behind the start of Mys Tyler?

My background is in telecommunications, which is not a very fashionable industry. Personally, I don’t really enjoy shopping and never come across the trends. I don’t have the knack for knowing what pieces go together or how to style them. I am the type of person that wears a dress and my friend pulls the shoulders down to make it strapless. I’m left thinking how I didn’t know this or think to try wearing it like that. Even though I’m not into fashion, I still like to look nice and always feel more confident when I like what I am wearing. I used to ask my stylish friends to go shopping with me, but what I soon realized was that they were experts at shopping for their own body. They were not very experienced shopping for my body type. As a result, they were not great at helping me. I began to wonder how I could find someone my height, shape, and size that was more fashionable that I could just copy. That is where the idea for Mys Tyler came from.

The name actually spells “MyStyler” but I wanted it to feel more feminine and personable. I like the spelling of “Mys”, as it’s mysterious. It isn’t exactly “miss” or “Mrs.” so it could be any woman.

Was the startup process nerve-wracking, exciting, scary, or a piece a cake?

Startups are definitely never a piece of cake. There are so many unknowns. When you start and it’s just you, you don’t have the luxury of just doing things you are good at. You also have to do all the things you are bad at. So you end up doing a lot of context switching, researching, experimenting, and pivoting.

Some businesses you can bootstrap (fund yourself), but Mys Tyler is a community-based platform. That means it requires a lot of technology and a lot of acquisition. This means helping people learn about you and convince

them to sign up. For this reason, we needed to fundraise from investors. That added a whole other layer of complexity. It’s nice to have money to put to work, but fundraising is extremely time consuming and draining as it takes up a huge amount of time. They say only one founder should focus on fundraising as a full-time job in a startup with two or three founders. As a sole founder, trying to balance fundraising with building the business left me at a point of near exhaustion... twice!

All that being said, I love what I do! I love creating something that has value for others. Now I have the most incredible team. We are doing it all together which is the most rewarding experience.

In 2012 I had my first startup called “Doodad”. I had been through the process of starting a business before because of this. Investors like serial entrepreneurs because they already know that they know what they are getting into is tough.

I didn’t pay myself for the first year of the business and now I am paid minimum wage. I was fortunate to have built up some savings while I had a corporate job in New York City, but I am putting everything I have into the business. It’s a high risk game. You need to be willing to be a poor founder for a while and work really hard... but honestly you couldn’t pay me any amount to be doing anything different!

How many of you got together to create this community?

I started on my own but I had been talking about this idea for nearly a decade when I started. During that time I had so much support from friends and family that helped me have the confidence to take the plunge.

I also went through a startup accelerator program. Twelve other companies got started at the same time I did. I had all these other founders around me going through the same things and we could help each other and share experiences.

I also had some amazing advisors from the beginning. They were absolutely incredible leaders and business experts that would offer up their time to talk things through and help with things like getting business contacts.

Over time the team has come together and so has the community. Now Mys Tyler is a combination of thousands of people adding value to the platform.

Let’s talk technology. Was the app built in-house? Are there any exciting new features in the works?

We have an incredible team of developers that build Mys Tyler. We wanted to launch on both iOS and Android, so we chose to build on “React Native” which is a crossplatform software. Things always take longer than you expect, partly because you always end up having to add in features and do work that you weren’t expecting which pushes other things back. When you have a small budget, you can’t build as fast as you want. It is constantly a matter of prioritizing. We have a lot of exciting things in the works! The biggest one is that we will be moving into hair and beauty in 2022. We can’t wait for that!

What did you guys wish to accomplish with the app?

Is the business motto and vision being fulfilled at the moment? Our tagline is “inspiration that fits”. It is the idea that you look at things like Instagram or advertisements where a lot of what you see is not relevant to you. That can be demoralizing. We wanted to create a better experience that was hyper-personalized in which the inspiration is all relevant, accessible, and actionable. This leads into our vision (which we still need to wordsmith) but in essence it is to help people find products or advice that help them live their best lives.

How else do you see Mys Tyler providing a solution for the gap in body positivity around the globe? Any advice for anyone in terms of body positivity?

Fashion has been traditionally (and intentionally) inaccessible. Advertising, catwalks, and social media project a very narrow view of what women look like. Layered upon that is makeup, lighting, retouching, and taking the perfect professional shot. We are left comparing ourselves to unrealistic standards and feeling bad about it. By helping women see real pictures of other women with diversity of heights, shapes, sizes, ages and ethnicities, we have been able to make women feel “normal” in the best sense. When you look at a social media feed that is diverse, it is amazing how quickly you start to normalize all body types. You will see how fabulous all the women look. That’s really empowering. In our recent survey, 58% of women said they are more body confident as a result of using Mys Tyler. We have had so many women reach out directly to say thank you. We are just getting started, but we know we have the ability to play a role in driving positive change.

Speaking of international influence, how many countries is Mys Tyler in now? Are there any prospectives for growth in the near future?

We have women using Mys Tyler in over one hundred countries, so we have truly gone global. The majority of women are in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand (which make up 70% of our base).

Tell us about contributors and how they can make an impact on the environment on MysTyler?

Contributors are women who post their outfits on Mys Tyler, sharing their style and their fashion “wins” with our community. When someone downloads Mys Tyler, we help them discover contributors that are most similar to them (we have a FIT Algorithm that creates a matching score based on height, size, shape, coloring etc). Value of our contributors is based on relevancy not popularity. We believe that if you find someone that is your body type you can see how things fit and how to style them. If you buy something based on their recommendation it’s more likely to fit, which means you are less likely to return it. This substantially helps the environment in three ways:

1. Less postage and handling (from returns)

2. Helps reduce discarded returns that end up in landfill

3. Buying less and spending less on things in your wardrobe that end up with the tags still on.

Any rules contributors have to follow? How does one become a contributor?

We welcome any woman to become a contributor and share fashion “wins” with our community. If women buy outfits you originally linked or suggested, you will also earn commission from our partner brands. So you can actually make money by sharing your style!

To apply, you just need to create your first four posts and hit the “apply” button on the profile tab. We do this so that we can make sure that the posts are fashion related (no pictures of birthday cakes, deserted beaches, filtered selfies etc) and are clear quality (we want to maintain a great feed for all of our users) pictures. We don’t want to turn anyone away, so we use this as an onboarding opportunity to teach our contributors how to create the best posts. Once approved, we let them post whenever they like!

During our last chat, you mentioned Mys Tyler will sponsor contributors’ photoshoot parties/sessions. What do you hope to accomplish with these sponsored shoots and parties? How does it work?

Initially, we only had a team presence in Sydney, Australia. In 2021, we were able to do some shoots in the US as well. If we are limited by whether or not we have a Mys Tyler team in a particular location we can’t do as many shoots as we would like. Now we are offering to “host a shoot” for contributors. If they can get a group of six or more contributors together for a day, Mys Tyler will provide the budget to hire a studio and a photographer to make that shoot happen while assisting from afar. We would love to be doing one shoot per month (minimum) all around the world. For now in 2022 our focus is in the US!

How do people download the app?

You can download the app from the App Store or Google Play. It’s free for everyone. If you want to be shown in the app, you will just need to become a contributor. Get your first four posts done and get your application in and we would love to see you in our feed!

Pick one: Cosmopolitan or Mys Tyler?

Scrolling Mys Tyler while sipping on a Cosmo!

Instagram or Mys Tyler?

Instagram to see what my friends are up to. Mys Tyler to be inspired by the most fashionable and fabulous women!

House of La France Magazine | Meet Sarah Neill