It feels like every month, 10 new fashion brands pop up to solve every problem consumers can imagine—and some that never came to mind. Shoppers can easily find shirts they don’t need to tuck in, or designed-to-order wedding gowns, but there are still challenges in navigating the ever-expanding apparel space.
One of the perennial problem of clothes shopping for women is finding a dress with pockets. Clothes designed for women are notorious for lacking pockets, offering tiny, impractical pockets, or even faking you out with faux pockets—especially irritating when shopping for formal, casual or business wear.
A new site makes the pocket quest that much easier. Aptly called dresseswithpockets.com, the newly launched website lets visitors search through multiple retailers’ inventories at once to find dresses that can handle cell phones, wallets and lip balm. Dresses With Pockets displays more than 6,000 dresses and skirts that all include pockets.
In a press release, founder Jim Sabo pointed out that women’s clothing is only just reaching the point where pockets are becoming part of the design conversation. “It’s bad enough that it’s taken this long for women’s clothing to start to have functional pockets,” said Sabo. “The least that we can do is make it easier to find those dresses and skirts that have them.”
Dresses With Pockets’ interface works similarly to any other e-commerce site. Users can search and filter by size, color, dress length and sleeve length, and organize results by popularity and price. In addition, the site has occasion and age groupings. Users can pick from 700 formal gowns, 150 options for young girls, and even close to 100 wedding dresses with pockets. The site aggregates from over 20 retailers, including Anthropologie, Forever 21, eShakti, ModCloth, Nordstrom, PinUp Girl Clothing, and Land’s End. The site also features international retailers.
The company encourages users to leave detailed reviews as well—and instructs users to share specs on the pockets themselves (“great for keys, phone and wallet,” vs “fine for lipstick and not much else”) to help fellow shoppers make educated purchasing decisions. As anyone who’s ever bought a dress and only later discovered it has pockets can attest, those reviews should be easy to come by: few things garner a happier review than functional fashion.