Fashion Tech Startups Emerging From Harvard B-School Runway in Droves

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Shoptiques — Former model and Goldman Sachs analyst Olga Vidisheva (HBS ’11) got the idea for Shoptiques after finding a pair of shoes at a boutique in Paris, and realizing she’d have to board a plane if she ever wanted to shop there again. Her frustration grew when she moved to Boston for business school and left behind her favorite New York boutiques—which didn’t have an online presence. After an internship at Channel during summer 2010, Vidisheva returned to Harvard to work on Shoptiques as an online shopping source for boutique inventory, and was among the top 10 finalists in the school’s business plan competition.”We find the world’s most exceptional boutiques and put them online,” thanks to e-commerce technology and even a global network of photographers that shoot pictures of boutiques’ inventory, says Vidisheva. Shoptiques is currently operating in private beta mode in preparation for a public launch next month, and is in the process of raising a funding round.

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Author: Erin Kutz

Erin Kutz has a background in covering business, politics and general news. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Boston University. Erin previously worked in the Boston bureau of Reuters, where she wrote articles on the investment management and mutual fund industries. While in college, she researched for USA Today reporter Jayne O’Donnell’s book, Gen Buy: How Tweens, Teens and Twenty-Somethings Are Revolutionizing Retail. She also spent a semester in Washington, DC, reporting Capitol Hill stories as a correspondent for two Connecticut newspapers and interning in the Money section of USA Today, where she assisted with coverage on the retail and small business beats. Erin got her first taste of reporting at Boston University’s independent student newspaper, as a city section reporter and fact checker and editor of the paper’s weekly business section.