On Saturday I spent the evening running around San Francisco trying to find, among other things, strangers to Vogue with and a newspaper article containing the words “digital” or “chic”. Why in the world would I be doing these things? Because I participated in my meetup group’s first (and hopefully annual) scavenger hunt.
Fellow Co-Founders Ashley LaFerriere and Jennie B spent a month organizing the hunt by coming up with lists of tasks and goodie bag swag so participants could have a fun list of things to photograph, tweet, and grab around the city in hopes of winning some pretty cool things from hunt sponsors.
The group met at The Grove, a cute coffee shop (that serves champagne!) over on 3rd and Mission for a meet and greet, to divvy up the teams, and some pre-hunt photos.
And then, we were off!
I was put on a team with Sarah Long, a girl who found out about the hunt by a tweet a prior member of the group had made about the event (thank you Twitter!). We decided to name our team “Pretty Ambitions”, because of our blog names, Pretty Innovative and AmbitionS.
After Ashley handed out the envelope containing the task list, Sarah and I immediately completed one task, by getting a photo of the two of us jumping. Then we ran across the street to the Big and Tall store for a team prom style photo. After that, we decided to take a trip to the Westfield Centre (visiting stores that included Nordstrom, Bloomingdales, Madewell, and Sanrio). We also went to places like the Four Seasons, Jeffrey’s Toys, tourist shops in Chinatown, and the Metreon to complete the rest. As time went on, Sarah and I were laughing harder and harder and it was easier and easier to walk up to strangers to ask for things. Here are a few photos of us starting off the hunt:
Other participants included fellow Co-Founder Sharon Vaknin and Digitally Chic members Adelle McElveen, Amy Wong, Mira Torres-Montalvo, Bridget O’Neal, Pomme Ratana, Amy Nievera, Nichole Albright, Haruka Tenou, and Kelly Dessoye.
To throw us off further, Ashley and Jennie tweeted more tasks from the DC Twitter handle while the hunt continued, two of which can be seen after completed below:
At 7:30,the final location was tweeted and teams had to meet there by 8 pm for the completed tasks to be counted.
And my team won!!!
The prizes were good alright. I still haven’t finished going through my bag of swag, but in the meantime want to give a big thank you to our sponsors: Photojojo, Urban Decay, Zipcar, Think Geek, Hashable, Marika King Jewelry, 18 Rabbits, Hansen’s, sweetriot, AHAVA, Gowalla, I Melt With You, Bumebox, Anisa Design, Cascade Ice Water, and to our event photographers: Co-Founder Ashley Gustafson and new DC member Max Braun.
And congrats to second place winners, Amy Wong and Mira Torres-Montavlo.
From Amy: “My favorite part was probably when we ran into a toy store to find a unicorn and a kid to hi-five. One boy was scared of us but then we found another boy and he was sooo excited to hi-five us!! He was trying to hi-five both of us before we could even take the picture. It was so cute! We were very excited to have won 2nd place! Our prizes were great. We got a 1 year membership to ZipCar, 6mo subscription to Tab Juice, $25 gift certificate to Starbucks, and a Gowalla tee shirt. This event was so much fun..can’t wait to do it again next year!!”
To see more photos from this event check out the photo album on the Digitally Chic Facebook fan page.
pretty-innovative.com 
