TaskRabbit Acquires Kids’ Clothing Startup One Jackson To Add Marketplace Expertise

TaskRabbit, the online marketplace that lets people outsource small jobs and tasks, has acquired One Jackson, an e-commerce site for kids’ clothing.

Financial terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed. One Jackson had raised some $2 million in funding from Accel’s Theresia Ranzetta and Trinity’s Patricia Nakache, along with Next View (David Beisel), Floodgate (Ann Miura-Ko), and Aileen Lee‘s seed fund Cowboy Ventures. TaskRabbit, for its part, has raised a total of $37.7 million.

This is TaskRabbit’s second-ever acquisition — earlier this year the company bought SkillSlate, which was an online directory for service providers.

The overlap between TaskRabbit and One Jackson may not be very apparent at first, but once you scratch the surface you see the similarities. One Jackson provides a unique twist on kids’ clothing shopping that works more like a voting and bidding marketplace than a typical e-commerce site. When my colleague Sarah Perez wrote about One Jackson’s launch this past summer, she likened it to a “Kickstarter without the upfront monetary commitment,” writing:

“Instead of designing clothes in-house or aggregating collections from elsewhere, the site will serve as a platform for connecting consumers with indie designers through contests where shoppers vote on which clothes they would like to see get produced and sold.”

It was a unique concept, but the TaskRabbit acquisition will be putting that product to bed. One Jackson has shut off its service as of today, and is telling customers to head over to kids’ clothing marketplace ThredUp for the remainder of its stock. The One Jackson team’s experience building a marketplace will now be put toward the core TaskRabbit product.

And of course, there is an acqui-hire element at work here too. With the deal TaskRabbit will be snapping up some solid new hires: Anne Raimondi, the co-founder and CEO of One Jackson who previously worked as the VP of marketing at Survey Monkey, will be joining TaskRabbit as Chief Revenue Officer. One Jackson’s co-founder and CTO Yee Lee will become TaskRabbit’s VP of Engineering, while engineers Ken Mitsumoto, Bob Ralian, and Rob Robbins will also be joining the company’s engineering team.

Update: Here is the official blog post announcing the news.