Have you heard of The Hunt? I just found out about it today after reading that Ashton Kutcher is backing this fashion start-up site. If you’re like me and don’t know much about it, basically, TheHunt.com makes social media photos “shoppable.”
According to the L.A. Times article, The San Francisco company, founded by Tim Weingarten and Simon Peck and launched in January, was created to help consumers find clothing, jewelry and other items seen in images shared on blogs, photo apps and social media platforms. It calls itself a community-driven online shopping experience. Since then, The Hunt has grown to 1 million monthly unique visitors. Hundreds of thousands of active members have started more than 100,000 hunts and found more than 200,000 products for each other.
With sites like Pinterest, we’ve become visual shoppers and often swoon over looks we repin for inspiration. Yet, what happens when you actually want to translate what you’ve pinned into something you own and you can’t find it, or worse, can’t afford it? This is where The Hunt comes in. All you have to do is post a link to an image which can be generated from Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr or a URL and then fill out things like a description, how much you’re willing to spend, and specifics like if you’re looking for the exact item, something similar to it or a suggestion on what you can wear with it. Pretty cool, huh?
Curious, I wanted to test out the technology and see what happened. This is an image of my first test hunt.
Randomly, I chose a pair of acid washed jeans (no, I don’t want a pair of acid washed jeans) from a graphic I did last week and posted it to The Hunt. I filled in all the specifics, posted it to the site and went on with my life assuming that my request would just gather dust in The Hunt’s visual wasteland. It wasn’t three minutes later that I heard my email ding and discovered that someone found those jeans for me.
Admittedly, at first glance I thought The Hunt was a bit gimmicky and just another thing to do (am I the only one who can get lost in the Pinterest vortex for hours if I’m not careful?), yet, after my quick test experiment, I’m wondering if this site actually has some legs. I’d have to play around with the site some more, but wanted to share it with all of you to get your thoughts.
