BEVERLY, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--FashionPlaytes (www.fashionplaytes.com), the retail industry’s first engagement-driven e-commerce company to target the tween consumers, today announced its $5 million Series B financing. New investors Leo Capital Holdings and Spindrift Equities participated in the financing alongside existing investors Fairhaven Capital, New Atlantic Ventures and Golden Seeds. At the leading edge of digital fashion design for tween girls, FashionPlaytes will use this funding to continue to enhance the engagement, social interaction and educational components of its FPGirl site.
The tween girl market is a rapidly growing powerhouse of spenders and influencers with an estimated economic impact of $43 billion annually, according to EMP Communications. FPGirl.com’s first-of-its-kind commerce platform fulfills tweens’ desire to create, connect and participate in the creative process of designing their own clothes. Over the past six months, FPGirl.com has grown to 500,000 registered tween users that spend an average of an hour per visit on the site and have created more than 5,000,000 unique designs.
“Tween girls expect to be engaged, entertained and enlightened during the time they spend with us on FPGirl.com and our fusion of content, commerce and community provides a rich experience for these first-time online shoppers,” said Sarah McIlroy, FashionPlaytes founder and CEO. “We are meeting the e-commerce expectations of tomorrow’s primary shoppers and helping them create social capital in an increasingly complex and highly interactive digital world.”
FashionPlaytes’ engagement-driven commerce model provides a fun, interactive platform for tween girls to discover and develop their own personal sense of style. On FPGirl.com they can design and purchase custom clothes based on their own individual preferences, interact with other fashion-forward tweens in a monitored forum, create a portfolio of designs they can share on the site or across other social network platforms, and learn from industry experts about the ins and outs of the fashion industry.
“FPGirl is rapidly becoming the e-commerce on-ramp for the next generation of consumer,” said Fairhaven Capital Partner Rudina Seseri. “This new generation doesn’t respond to ‘point and click’ shopping, they want a rich, personal shopping experience and the ability to interact with a brand. The FashionPlaytes model provides a compelling engagement framework that will be essential to creating deep and sustained brand relationships as consumer expectations and the e-commerce industry evolve.”
About FashionPlaytes and FPGirl.com
At the forefront of e-commerce innovation, FashionPlaytes is redefining the ‘e’ in e-commerce with its engagement-driven commerce platform for the next generation of consumer, the digital girl. Fusing content, commerce and community, FashionPlaytes created FPGirl.com, the first girl-driven fashion and style community offering girls the means to create, share and buy original looks. FPGirl.com enables tweens to transform creative ideas into wearable fashions. Leveraging the power of thousands of tween consumers through digital interaction and crowdsourcing, FPGirl.com features and sells the unique styles of young girls nationally. Please visit FashionPlaytes.com or FPGirl.com.