Keeping up on the latest trends, the biggest sales and your favorite brands was a lot of work until now. OptHub is a utility app allowing you to shop the latest fashions without clogging your inbox with brand emails.
This app is essentially a shopper’s paradise where you can “opt” in to any brand, store, sports team and anything else you are interested in and receive updates.
OptHub was started by UO freshman Andrew Timlin in 2012 while he was still in high school. He started this app as a way for consumers to connect with brands without having to share their personal email.
“While working at Lacoste I found out that people don’t like to give away their personal email, so I thought, let’s create an app called OptHub where you no longer have to subscribe to brand emails or download brand apps,” Timlin said.
Since then OptHub has grown into a lifestyle app combining all brand content into one visual browser with the ability to opt in to whichever brand, company or team you want to receive information from. OptHub has taken a fragmented market and brought it together.
The app also allows for an easier online shopping and browsing experience, which makes it easy to compare items from different stores in one place.
“It just simplifies the online shopping process and just browsing,” freshman Aran Schwoebel said. “I keep up on the brands that I am interested in, and I look for coupons and sales that different brands have.”
Timlin has spent his freshman year juggling 70 plus hours of developing this app, school and somehow maintaining a social life.
“We are very busy. We just sleep less. You don’t need that much sleep. We can sleep when we are rich. I’ll sleep on my yacht … just kidding,” Director of Media and Marketing Thomas Tullis said.
These driven freshmen are dedicated to their work and are already being rewarded.
“We have a couple thousand users now and got our first round of financing,” Timlin said.
The most rewarding thing so far for Timlin has been seeing how the users like OptHub and how it actually helps people simplify their lives.
Timlin was inspired by a quote from Leonardo Da Vinci: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” That is, he says, the ultimate goal behind OptHub.
For now the app continues to grow and Timlin is focused on building a strong team to help the growth of the app excel.
OptHub will soon be introduced another feature that allows you to put in all of your check out information into the settings of OptHub and it will save it. The idea behind doing this is to make shopping on OptHub simple.
“Shoppers will have the ability to one click shop from every brand,” Tullis said.
If you are looking for a simplistic way to stay up-to-date on the latest fashions, OptHub is worth checking out.
“In one year OptHub will be the new big thing. I guarantee that,” Timlin said.