July 20, 2013
Fashion Icon Tyra Banks Fierce Capital, LLC. Invests in New Startup
Fashion icon Tyra Banks announced today that her company, Fierce Capital, LLC, will be investing in The Hunt, the first community-driven online shopping experience that makes social media photos shoppable.
Fresh off a completion of the three-year Owner/President Management program at Harvard Business School, Tyra has established Fierce Capital, LLC to help promising startups raise capital and develop profitable business strategies.
The Hunt marks the first fashion investment for Tyra through her recently formed Fierce Capital, LLC, the investment arm of The Tyra Banks Company, for which she is Chairman and CEO.
The Hunt marks the first fashion investment for Tyra through Fierce Capital, LLC, which aims to identify, develop and invest in early-stage startup companies, including firms that are female-led or female-focused. Tyra views The Hunt not just as an investment but also as a real opportunity to help women seek out style inspiration.
Based in San Francisco and co-founded by tech entrepreneurs Tim Weingarten and Simon Peck, The Hunt is the first community-driven online shopping experience that makes it easy and fun to shop for the things you see in photos on sites like Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr.
As time spent online and on mobile rapidly shifts to sites and apps with the most visually appealing and highest volume of images, the nature of how consumers discover the styles they want to wear and buy is also changing. For a shopper, this creation of photo sharing has caused a major problem: the impossibility of translating the discovery of a trend or style from a user generated photo into a set of products that match the look and your budget. The Hunt solves this problem by providing a community where consumers help others to find products seen across tens of millions of images shared on blogs, photo apps and social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr. The site provides a true social shopping experience, allowing consumers to find and buy products based on suggestions from others in real time.
In just a few months, The Hunt has surged to one million monthly unique visitors and hundreds of thousands of active members that have started over 150,000 hunts and found over 250,000 products for each other.
“The Hunt brings a fun and innovative approach to shopping and fashion,” says Tyra Banks. “What I love most about The Hunt is that women help other women find their perfect outfit H2T [head-to-toe]. I am excited to be part of this new approach to collective retail and styling.”