Coolspotters, a site that aggregates celebrity style trends in wiki-fashion, just snagged $2 million in a second round of capital for its parent company Fanzter. Today’s homepage, for example, highlights Ashton Kutcher’s avid use of Twitter, Bruce Willis’ sexy Ray-Ban shades and John Mayer’s Blackberry Storm. Basically, it’s a site for people who care where [...]
In addition to perusing brands and products based on the celebrities who use them, you can go straight to the products themselves (organized into categories like entertainment, cars and places). For example, under cars, you can navigate to green cars, and then to the actual models. Clicking on Tesla Motors’ roadster, you are taken to a page with a description and photo of the product, users’ comments on it, those who have become fans of it, and of course a list of celebrities who have publicly expressed interest in it (supposedly). For the roadster, this includes green-conscious actors Leonard DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, Google founder Sergey Brin and wildcard Condoleezza Rice. The more nebulous ‘places’ category includes resorts, cafes, spas and sporting venues that celebrities have visited at some point. And under the general products tab, you can view jewelry, furniture, phones, software and much more that have also gotten the gilterati stamp of approval.
But Coolspotters isn’t just a catalogue of the unattainable. It conveniently provides links to buy many of the products it showcases via eBay, Amazon and other online vendors — like the $81,485 Shelby Cobra GT500 Mustang preferred by David Hasselhoff, and the $30 Crocs adored by Jake Gyllenaal and Brooke Shields alike.
Most of the content on the site is added by the users themselves, who have the ability to create profiles for celebrities, products and brands and constantly add information, just like on Wikipedia. So for example, if you are leisurely flipping through Us Weekly and spot Lauren Conrad rocking a pair of Jimmy Choos, you can manually add them to her Coolspotters profile. The site says it has about ten to 20 designated community editors to monitor content. It gained some credibility when it first launched by partnering with famed celebrity stylist Rachel Zoe, but its accuracy is by no means assured.
Now, six months later, Fanzters says the site draws about 300,000 unique monthly users. It plans to use its new funding to continue building out the platform, which will soon include mobile applications. The money was provided by Steamboat Ventures (backed notably by Disney) and Second Avenue Partners — which also led the Collinsville, Conn. company’s $1.87 million first round of financing.
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