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Darling, I saw you on my phone

Maya Villiger created TurnedOut.tv

There’s nothing a bunch of fashion mavens loves more than peering at what other fashion mavens are wearing, preferably on the streets of somewhere glamorous, and then talking about it. Add in the hit accessory of the year, the iPhone, and you’ve got the germ of Maya Villiger’s idea for TurnedOut.tv, the world’s first web- and mobile-compatible street style site.

Villiger, a former suit at Colenso in Auckland, had a chance to reinvent her career when she joined her fiancé in New York a couple of years ago. She was looking for an outlet for her passion for street photography, saw the mobile website space taking off and spotted the gap for female-oriented content.

The mobile web, she says, “is like the Internet all over again. It’s an extremely uncluttered market with a very low number of publishers—and 3G phones are so fast and so cheap.”

It helps that her partner is Derek Handley, one of the founders of Kiwi mobile marketing pioneers The Hyperfactory. She rounded up a series of street editors (fellow expat Kiwis in Paris, London, Sydney, New York and Auckland, and Villiger herself now in LA) to feed their street style photos and blogs.

Toyota pitched in with an on-site campaign called ‘Corolla Cool-finder’: editors making their favourite picks from various fashion labels. Villiger syndicates content between publishers and across carriers, with a deal in the pipeline with one of the biggest of the breed, The JC Report.  The site has quickly built to 25,000 unique visitors a month, the majority from the US and Australia.

“We’re meeting the demand for on-the-go content,” says Villiger. “It’s about giving style-hungry readers everywhere a peek at what’s happening in great cities around the world.”

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