The Hunt is being hailed as the first “community-driven online shopping experience”. The new site is taking on other competitor style-sites with new social-media aspects, all aimed at helping shoppers find, and buy, their favorite styles from anywhere on the web.
It’s easy to find items to fall in love with on cover-shoots, fashion magazine spreads or on social-media, but to actually find where you can buy those items can be quite a chore. That is where ‘The Hunt’ comes in to play. The company announced today that through investors like Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary’s AGR-ade Investments, Rohan Oza (who made Vitamin Water and Pop Chips household brands), RedOne (the Grammy-winning producer behind Lady Gaga and Jennifer Lopez ), Keli Lee (EVP of Casting for ABC Entertainment Group), Anjula Acharia-Bath (CEO of Desi Hits) and Michael Banks (noted media investor) it has raised around $2.7 million dollars.
The company attributes its success to the unique approach to solving online shoppers “number one pain point” and that is where to find the products seen on the internet. Whether these images are shared on blogs, photo apps or popular social media platforms (like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr) the Hunt aims to find them all. The website launched publicly last January, and already has one million monthly unique visitors and “hundreds of thousands of active members that have started over 100,000 hunts and found over 200,000 products for each other” according to the company.
“Our fast growth is directly attributed to the nature and involvement of our passionate community, and the opportunity we are addressing – helping consumers identify and shop for street-style looks seen globally through images shared across the Internet,” said Tim Weingarten , founder and chief executive officer, The Hunt. “Today’s funding announcement from an extraordinary line up of investors further validates the strength and uniqueness of what The Hunt offers its members.”
The Hunt provides the ideal community to achieve this by making millions of online images shoppable and by enabling its members to provide styling advice to each other. The site provides a true social shopping experience, allowing consumers to find and buy products based on suggestions from others, in real time and at a scale that only the Internet can afford.
more info: thehunt
