UsTrendy sews up

Daily Fashion Juice
Friday, May 6, 2011

Fashion site UsTrendy sews up ~$1M from Draper Boston Business Journal

- by Galen Moore


It's safe to say the fashion industry does not see Sam Sisakhti coming. But the 28-year-old Brandeis graduate has about $1 million from a Sand Hill VC, and a plan to get egg all over someone’s Dolce & Gabbana glasses.

Us Trendy Inc. (UsTrendy), a 10-person startup based in Cambridge, is like Kickstarter for fashion. The company has an e-commerce platform that lets the adventurous fashionista shop indie designers - the ones people are buying and liking. Want to know what a clothes horse wears to the club in Prague? In Bangalore? In Jakarta? UsTrendy has that, as well as the clever kid toiling in a cramped Union Square loft, Sisakhti said.

The company was founded in 2008 as a fashion-centric social media service. The e-commerce piece came last spring, and soon after it drew venture capital interest. UsTrendy has just closed a round near $1 million with Draper Associates, the affiliate fund led by DFJ’s Tim Draper.

The site brings to the surface designers who otherwise might not have a chance at getting into the high-fashion club, Sisakhti said. Instead, they’ll end up working for big-name designers, who tell the shopping public what we want. The startup plans to turn all of that the other way around. “All these different industries are modernizing, and the fashion industry seemed sort of medieval,” he said. “We’re trying to remove all the filters.”

In addition to discovery and online marketing, UsTrendy provides designers with logistical support - group buying power in shipping and warehousing, for example, Sisakhti said. The young company has already run into a couple of cases where designer members have been unable to keep up with the demand it has generated.

Now, CEO Sisakhti is looking to hire a CTO and a CMO in Boston, and add engineers. The site is coded in PHP, he said. “We’re not doing rocket science, but we are constantly adding features” - including a Facebook app and photo sharing, for example. Investors, he wants to get to know you, so be in touch - but UsTrendy won’t likely raise funds for another one and a half years, Sisakhti said.