Objects of everyday beauty, at Ava.ph

Online shopping in the Philippines is coming of age, and thank God. A friend of mine just got tabbed with a P6,000 bill in customs fees for something FedExed from the States. Why bother, when we’ve got wonderful options right here? A couple of weeks ago we witnessed the grand launch of Zalora, an e-commerce site with more than 5,000 fashion and home products. While Zalora is an inclusive shop, selling a great range of brands while constantly adding stock, the new site Ava.ph is more of an exclusive store, featuring a number of interesting and not mass-market brands, handpicked by a cast of “curators,” personalities in the style industry.

“Memories endure because they are attached to objects in the real world,” founder Oliver Segovia writes in his introduction to the website. “We are, quite literally, our beautiful things.” Ava is the boutique shop within the mall, so to speak, with a carefully chosen collection of future memory-makers. The style council consists of designer Tippi Ocampo, tattooed foodie Erica Paredes, momtrepreneur Bianca Elizalde, creative director Luis Espiritu, tailor Abdul Salam, bag lady Amina Aranaz, blogger Christine Dychiao, and Katrina Holigores, founding editor of Ava’s e-zine. Kat, my former editor at Metro and a current YStyle columnist, tells me more about this newest endeavor.

YStyle: First of all, what is Ava, how did it come about, and what does it want to be?   

Katrina Holigores: Ava.ph is an e-commerce site that was founded by CEO Oliver Segovia and his team. He had the idea of creating a local Gilt.com, an online world where people could shop for beautiful things. Alex Lapa, of the Reluctant Stylista, serves as creative director. I came onboard early this year to create Ava.Zine (ava.ph/avazine/), the editorial arm to the e-commerce site. The intention behind this e-zine was to not only give concise yet informative content on design and lifestyle choices to online shoppers but also to give them tips on how else to enhance the way they live with good taste from our “experts” who we’ve called idea-listers.

What are the roles of the curators?

These curators list their ideas of what are the best or must-haves that ava.ph has to offer while our contributors give their insights on (for example) the pros and cons of online shopping, how to shop for your boyfriend or husband or how to integrate art into your everyday life. Luis Espiritu will be coming up with his own section soon wherein he will give a visual documentation of design inspirations he finds on his numerous trips and events he finds himself in, not to mention the chic men and women he has been able to style throughout the years. Watch for it!

How do you choose the brands you work with?

We select products based on their quality. They are pretty to look at, unique and not readily available. Plus, they’re well-priced and can be considered valuable additions to anyone’s wardrobe or bag of beauty goodies.

Tell me about some of the products you are highlighting this month.

We’re proud to announce that we’ve now got a line of Tyler women’s wear, retro-looking handsets for your mobile phone from Native Union (very trendy in Hollywood now), Aranaz bags and School of Satchel totes. More products are being added to our inventory every month so it’s a great idea to be a part of our mailing list to be the first to see what’s new on offer.

What’s the shopping experience like?

The shopping experience is relatively straightforward, you get on the site, click on the shops or sales tab, or, you can click on Ava.Zine to see what our Idea-listers recommend and then you pay via Paypal for what you want. Item then gets delivered right to your doorstep within a couple of days, provided it is still available as some of our products move really fast!

You can also ask the editor for advice and recommendations or even send a query to any of our Idea-listers since their blog or twitter link is located right under their names.

 What’s in the next Ava.Zine?

For our next issue, we’ve nominated about 30 women who’ve done well on the world-wide web, female entrepreneurs and put them out on our FB page for people to vote. The response was pretty incredible, so you can see in our main feature who came out in the top 10.

All in all the goal of the team of Ava is to give its subscribers (both new and old) a seamless shopping experience plus informative, quality editorial that just makes their time online a little more entertaining and even educational.