The Hunt raises $5.5M for Cathy-level shopping app

There’s a certain type of human being who considers shopping to be a totally valid hobby, interest, group activity, or light-cardio-type sport.

Take Cathy. Girlfriend was a shopper. Or take half the women on reality TV — the unreal housewives and their ilk. Or my husband. Seriously.

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I do not understand these people at all, nor do I understand the appeal of shopping as a leisure activity. Unless we’re talking about a thrift store outting, shopping trips generally make me anxious and clammy. Which is why I decided to write about The Hunt, an app that is designed for intense shoppers and confuses me so much I just want to go take a nap.

Here’s how it works: The app lets you take a picture of some poor passerby on the street or snag an image from the Internet, then demand of other Internet-using super-shoppers details on the product in question and how it can be acquired.

Alternatively, you can look at someone else’s uploaded pictures and be all like, “Oh, yeah, you can get that at Neiman’s or 7-11 or whatever, here’s a link.”

One of the spokespeople for the app is quoted as saying, “It’s like hanging in the fitting room with your close friends.”

Get me out of this fitting room. This is so awkward. Can they see my underpants? Why are we all in here?

The whole Hunt process is either avoiding shopping altogether, or it’s some kind of meta-shopping dystopian hellscape that only a “real” shopper would get. I don’t even.

Anyhoo, The Hunt raised $5.5 million in its first round of institutional funding, which was announced today, so I guess there are some VC shoppers out there — namely, the nerds at Javelin. Good on ya, folks.

Also today, TheHunt is announcing its iPhone app, built to the standards and specifications of iOS 7. Here’s what it looks like:

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