Female Founders Of Snapette Not Your Typical Geek Entrepreneurs 

Sarah Paiji (left) and Jinhee Ahn Kim (right) with their favorite fashion blogger BryanBoy

The founders of Snapette are not your prototypical start-up entrepreneurs. At least in the minds of some Silicon Valley venture capitalists.

The two founders, Jinhee Anh Kim and Sarah Paiji, are not prototypical young, male engineers from Silicon Valley. They’re women with business backgrounds from the East Coast and other parts outside the Valley. But that’s a plus according to those who did invest in the company’s $1.3 million seed round. Investors include Brian Lee, founder and CEO of Shoedazzle. The company previously went through Dave McClure’s 500 Startups incubator program. (See my previous story here.)

“I think for a lot of (VCs), they heard the words: fashion, shoes and handbags, and just didn’t hear beyond that,” says Jinhee Anh Kim, co-founder of Snapette. “They say, ‘We’ll have my wife or girlfriend check this out.’ But for the ones that did understand, they hear beyond fashion and they’re not turned off and then they understand the underlying product behind it.”

A number of Snapette’s investors turned out to be female, though there were male investors as well. At the same time, many fashion-focused tech start-ups are founded by men, which puts Snapette at an advantage, says Sarah Paiji, co-founder of Snapette. “We feel it’s quite an advantage for us to understand how women approach shopping and the whole user experience of an app or website,” Paiji says. “We’re actually pleased that we’re a little bit of outsiders to the whole ecosystem and we think we can add value to what’s already out there.”

Snapette is a mobile photo-sharing app focused on fashion. People take photos of apparel and fashion items and then use Snapette to find nearby products using the phone’s GPS technology. They can view a stream of photos of nearby items or those that are new or “hot.” The geo-location app has a kind of intense focus on its particular vertical in the same way that an app like Foodspotting focuses on food photos and restaurants. Brands and retailers can also post photos on Snapette.

While there are many shopping and style websites, Snapette is different because it focuses on actual products in the real world connected to location. “Ecommerce has come quite a ways,” says Paiji. “If I’m looking for a pair of silver shoes I can go Google or Zappos, but if I want to find those shoes in the real world in a 10 mile radius of where I currently live there’s no way to search and shop in the physical world.”

Shopping is an inherently social activity, which makes Snapette a way for people to share with and follow people with similar fashion tastes, Kim says. “For women shopping is still a very social experience,” Kim says. “When they do have a Saturday afternoon free, they go shop with friends or family. So we to want really bring that experience into our app.”