Grabble: for the ones that got away

If you’ve been reading this blog for more than a couple of weeks, you probably know that I spend my life locked in an endless battle with retail websites: a battle which involves me holding off on purchasing something until the moment it sells out, and then having to either search eBay, or just sit and hit the ‘refresh’ button on my browser for hours on end, until I finally track down the sought-after item. Look, you have your hobbies, I have mine, OK?

I call these items ‘The Ones That Got Away’: or ‘The Lost Boys’, if you will.  (By ‘boys’ I obviously mean ‘items of clothing or footwear’ and by ‘lost’ I mean, “Why yes, I HAVE been watching Once Upon a Time’ again: what of it?) There was the bottle green Zara jacket. The taffeta Topshop skirt. Those Office shoes that I still get eBay alerts for to this day, even although I know I probably wouldn’t wear them even if I DID find them. Poor lost boys: how I mourn them.

One of the reasons so many of these items “get away” from me, however, is a simple matter of organisation. (The other reason is that, despite my best efforts, I’m still not a millionaire, so I can’t afford to buy everything my heart desires. The struggle is real, people.) The fact is, I look at a LOT of retail websites every day in the course of my job, and I find a LOT of things I want to buy on them. Some of those items get bookmarked, and some get pinned. Some of them get emailed to myself (Please tell me I’m not the only one who sends themselves emails?), and some of them … well, some of them just get plain ol’ forgotten. Is your heart bleeding yet? Mine is.

Enter Grabble.

I was asked to try out this app last week, and after a bit of Googling, I found it was being described as “the Tinder of fashion”. Intrigued, I downloaded it (it’s totally free), and have spent the past few days having a bit of a play around with it. Now, I’ve never used Tinder, but from what I’ve read, Grabble does sound fairly similar, in that it allows you to simply swipe the screen to either “grab” or “throw” the items it presents you with. (Er, these are clothing items, by the way, not people. You got that, right? So it’s not EXACTLY like Tinder, obviously…)

Once you’ve signed up for your account, you go directly to the home screen, where the app will start to present you with photos of items currently available to buy. If you like the item, swipe right to “grab” it. If you hate it, swipe left to “throw” it. The items you grab will be saved in your “my grabs” screen (Anyone else singing that to the tune of ‘My Humps”? No? Just me, then.), where you can view them at your pleasure: oh, and if any of them go on sale, you’ll get a handy alert, so you can buy them BEFORE they’re sold out, and thus save yourself a whole world of trouble. In a couple of weeks’ time, you’ll also be to purchase items with one click, via the app, so shopping online will become even more dangerous, I mean easier. Yes, easier.

Here are my “grabs” (my grabs, my lovely lady grabs…):

No surprises there, then: one thing I forgot to mention is that the app also organises items into “collections”, which are groups of products with different themes. At the moment, there’s a “spots and stripes” collection on there, and, well, let’s just say I may well have bought the polka dot trousers. OK, I DID buy the polka dot trousers. One of the reasons this app is fairly lethal for me is that it features a lot of the retailers I shop from already: Zara is on there, as are ASOS, Topshop and Shopbop, plus a ton more, so there’s a fairly wide range of prices and styles. The one downside at the moment is that there isn’t a huge amount of products from each individual retailer, and the items there are tend to be quite trend-led, which means I’ve thrown more than I’ve grabbed: that, however, is just me, and it’s probably a good thing for my bank account, too, because if I was grabbing more than I throw, and then buying what I grab, I’d probably be divorced by now.

Anyway, as I said, the app is free to download on the app store , and you can also follow the team on Instagram @Grabblegram – use the hashtag #grabhappy to show them what you’ve “grabbed”. Now let’s all place bets on how long it takes me to buy the gingham trousers…

P.S. A couple of people commented on Instagram saying they thought this was a pregnancy announcement, so just to be clear: a) ouch and b) nope.

[This is a sponsored post.]