You know sometimes when you interact with a lot of startups, you start thinking that every problem that needs to be solved has already been solved. Well think again!
First Round Capital VC Phineas Barnes and a gaggle of other New Yorkers like MessageParty’s Amanda Peyton and Jason Gavris, former Zappos UX director Brian Kalma, Foursquare Biz Dev director Eric Friedman and Techstars designer Rebecca Zhou have built Today’s Kicks, a mobile and web platform for “sneakerheads” — or people who are obsessed with shoes but not in a creepy way — to interact with other Twitter users who share the footwear fetish.
Upload a snapshot of your shoes to Today’s Kicks (see mine above) and you can choose to send it to either Twitter or to the app itself. Today’s Kicks pulls in all images that use the hashtag #today’s kicks to populate , and you can search for shoes through Newest, Best, Mine (your own) and Loved (most liked).
Barnes says he came up with the idea when he started posting pictures of his sneakers to Twitter with his own made up hashtag #todayskicks and it caught on. It turns out that another dude (who coincidentally turned out to be Friedman) had bought the domain and the two ended up partnering up to create a new way to discover awesome shoes.
Peyton tells me that the ultimate vision for Today’s Kicks is as a vertical vehicle for mobile commerce, and that the company plans to sell through the app what the community deems as the sickest kicks. On that note, have you seen the brogues on a certain Mr. Hunter Walk from YouTube? Who got the keys to the Jeep?
