TaskRabbit Partners Up With Gap, Giving Free Gift Vouchers To Customers Who Spend $75 Or More In SF And NYC Stores

Tons of people I know swear by TaskRabbit, and its application for outsourcing odd jobs and random tasks to strangers. But not everyone knows about the service. So in a bid to raise awareness in some key markets, TaskRabbit has partnered with clothing retailer Gap to hand out gift vouchers this holiday season.

As part of the partnership, Gap customers shopping in stores throughout San Francisco and New York City will receive $25 gift vouchers for spending $75 or more at the stores. Those vouchers will be able to be redeemed for any task through the end of the year — whether it be gift wrapping, holiday shopping, or whatever.

There will be eight participating locations in all — four in each city — and in certain locations, Gap customers will also be able to use a TaskRabbit Concierge Desk to book their tasks right there in the store. Those locations are the Flood Building store in downtown San Francisco and the store at 5th Avenue and 18th Street in New York’s Flatiron district. Those stores will also have holiday photo booths available, with TaskRabbits manning them.

The promotion begins this Saturday, December 8, and stretches through to Christmas Eve. TaskRabbit gift certificates will need to be redeemed by January 1, 2013. The whole thing is tied in with Gap’s holiday marketing campaign around different types of love during the holidays. Love for a spouse, love for Mom, stuff like that. The TaskRabbit aspect is about loving oneself — you know, enough to outsource tasks to someone else.

Anyway, this isn’t the first partnership that Gap has done with a tech startup: Two years ago, it struck a partnership with Foursquare that provided discounts for check-ins at its stores during the holidays. That was a big deal for the mobile location app maker, and probably helped to put it on the map with the Normals.

The TaskRabbit partnership is smaller in scale, as it’s focused on just two markets, but it could help generate awareness for the startup in some key cities. TaskRabbit has also done marketing deals with Bravo TV and Pepsi Next, and we can probably expect more to come, as it continues to expand.

TaskRabbit was founded in 2008, and has raised just less than $40 million since then, including a $13 million round led by Founders Fund in July. The service is currently available in nine cities around the country, including San Francisco, New York, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, Austin, San Antonio, and Los Angeles. But it expects to add more in 2013, including its first international locations in places like London or Vancouver.