The Story of Snapette, an iOS Fashion App

I can’t tell you the number of times when I’ve been out and about and seen an amazing shoe that I took a picture of to text to my mom or one of my girl friends. In the end, these pictures would either end up saved on my phone or eventually deleted. But now I am able to save all photos to one place, Snapette, where other fashion fans will be able to enjoy my finds and I am able to see theirs too.

Last Friday, I sat down with Sarah Paiji, a co-founder of Snapette, and she told me the story of how this cool new fashion app came to be.

The Story

Sarah Paiji, originally from a suburb of LA, found herself on the East Coast for the past 8 years, including time in school at Harvard and working for Goldman Sachs, McKinsey & Co and Berkshire Partners. Most recently before Snapette, Paiji was studying at Harvard Business School. It was through an HBS alumni event where she met Jinhee Kim, an HBS alum more than two decades her senior, and more importantly, a woman with a very big idea.

According to Paiji, the two had a short meeting over coffee, after meeting at a Harvard alumni event. Soon after, Kim invited Paiji to spend her January 2011 term with the Kim family in London… to launch a company. Snapette.

With “no dominant social app yet” in fashion, and mobile being a space with such great growth potential, Paiji decided this was a chance too good to pass up.

After the two recruited a technical person to join their team (and for a month in London), the real work began.

Luckily, a tweet Paiji made about their new app was found by Dave McClure of 500 Startups, a startup incubator located in Mountain View, and soon McClure was inviting the Snapette team to relocate to California and work from the 500 Startups office space.

Just yesterday, 500 Startups hosted its second ever Demo Days, a place for its entrepreneurs to present their ideas to investors and press. The Snapette team presented, along with more than 20 other startups, as the culmination of their 3 month period in the 500 Startups accelerated program.

Think about it, within 8 months, Snapette went from an idea, to a company, and to a company that publications like Forbes and VentureBeat are now covering. That is pretty inspiring.

The App

Paiji describes the app as this: like Milo for fashion.

Snapette lets users upload an unlimited amount of content to the app (available on iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch) and browse other users’ finds as well. For now, users can see shoes and bags that others have uploaded from around the world, and content uploaded by nearby stores. Users are able to search by brand, store, description, or “New”, “Near”, and “Hot” ratings of products.

And of course, there is further social integration with sites like Facebook.

Right now the Snapette team is focusing its efforts on working with boutiques in New York, LA, San Francisco, and London, including San Francisco-based boutiques like Heidi Says and Gimme Shoes.

Why stop with shoes and bags? Well for now, the Snapette team decided to just start with those products because “women are passionate about them”, according to Paiji.

Within 6 months, Paiji hopes to see the team add more features to Snapette and figure out whether to decide to focus more on fashion or the social experience.

*Note: A big thank you to Hong Quan of 500 Startups for the introduction.