PriceGrabber Acquires Fashion App Snapette

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By Lauren Indvik2013-08-20 04:01:22 UTC

PriceGrabber, a price-comparison shopping site, has acquired two-year-old shopping app Snapette for an undisclosed amount.

Snapette is designed to connect iPhone and Android owners with fashion merchandise in nearby stores. The company has partnered with more than 200 brands and retailers — some large, such as Nine West and Joie, others small. Together, they serve users an Instagram-like feed of new products as they arrive in stores.

Snapette will continue to operate as an independent company under PriceGrabber, and its nine-person team has moved to a new office in New York. (PriceGrabber is headquartered in L.A.)

Snapette users won't notice any difference in the apps, including the appearance of PriceGrabber branding, Sarah Paiji (pictured left), co-founder and CEO of Snapette, told Mashable in a phone interview Monday.

That said, Snapette is planning on a strategy shift, one that's been in place before acquisition talks with PriceGrabber began. Instead of trying to draw users into stores, Paiji said she and her team want to bring transactions into the app, which is something users have been asking for. The move will allow Snapette to show retailers that it really is making an impact. Currently, it's difficult to prove whether the app is driving consumers into stores.

Snapette started meeting with PriceGrabber at the beginning of this year to see how the startup could leverage PriceGrabber's catalog of approximately 12,000 merchants, according to Paiji. Eventually, those conversations moved towards acquisition: PriceGrabber was looking for a company with mobile expertise, and Snapette wanted to expand to the web.

"The timing was right," Paiji said. "We raised a round at the end of 2011, and so it was time for us to start thinking about doing another round [or] an exit."

She added that Snapette's original vision — connecting smartphone users with local shops — is ahead of its time: "I do strongly believe it will get resolved in the next one to two years." But for now, the company will focus on online transactions, expanding to the web and the iPad.

Snapette marks one of the first successful exits for a fashion-related mobile technology startup to date. Between 2009 and 2011, a range of startups in the category — Pose, Snapette, Fashism, GoTryItOn — were able to raise as much as seven figures to launch their ideas. Since then, however, they have struggled to turn the ideas into real businesses. Pose is building an advertising platform, but GoTryItOn has folded, its founder now employed by another fashion startup called Rent the Runway. Fashism hasn't raised any capital since its Series A round nearly three years ago.

Snapette has raised only a single round of funding, amounting to $1.5 million, from venture capital firms and angel investors, including Shoedazzle and The Honest Company founder Brian Lee. The startup has kept the rest of its investment roster private.

Images: Snapette

Topics: Business, Fashion, fashion app, pricegrabber, snapette, Startups