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03/28/12 | Uncategorized

Entrepreneur Nikki Durkin Launches 99Dresses At Y Combinator

Female-founded fashion startup launches out of Y Combinator Demo Day.
By Simone Brummelhuis (Founder, TheNextWomen)

Australian entrepreneur Nikki Durkin has re-launched 99Dresses at the Y Combinator Winter 2012 Demo Day. Tech pundits Robert Scoble and Ben Parr (former editor at Mashable) have already named 99Dresses their favourite company to come out of Y Combinator’s Winter 2012 program.

Nikki Durkin, Founder of 99Dresses, said Y Combinator had helped provide the perfect platform for their global expansion.

“The last three months in Mountain View, California, have been a tremendous experience for myself and the talented team we’ve assembled. We’ve been able to hone in on our offering to women all around the world, perfect our business model, and start marketing 99Dresses. 99Dresses is an infinite wardrobe for women. Using virtual currency called buttons, women around the world can trade clothing and accessories, so they’re never limited to just the clothes they have at home.”

The founder went very politically incorrect by saying “We’ve created crack for women.”

But her own praise is strengthened indeed by others.

“I love it, it’s addictive as Pinterest,” said Krishna Vedati, angel investor and serial entrepreneur.

Y Combinator funded the startup through its accelerator program. A further funding round will be announced shortly.

Nikki Durkin is a young serial entrepreneur from Australia. In an interview recently she said, “I started my first online business, KultKandy, at the age of 15 selling t-shirts that I would design and have printed and drop shipped from China. I sold these through eBay and grew the business over 2 years to be a highly profitable little venture for a school kid, selling hundreds of shirts each month. At 18, I partnered with Pollenizer and launched 99Dresses – the world’s first Infinite Wardrobe of Free Fashion for women – by creating a Facebook page that was shared with over 40,000 women and using that fanbase to attract our first users. 99dresses opened for trading in September 2010 and has been growing ever since.”

It’s great that a highly praised female entrepreneur comes out of the Y Combinator program.

Only 3 years ago, Jessica Livingston explained the low percentage of female entrepreneurs in the program, “so far, 10 out of 145, or about 7%. This ratio is reflective of our applicant pool. Of course, I’m hoping this number will increase.”

We would love to know the current numbers in 2012!

This post was originally published at TheNextWomen.

About the guest blogger: Simone Brummelhuis is Founder, CEO and Editor-in Chief of TheNextWomen, the First Women’s Internet Business Magazine and Community with a focus on startups and growing businesses, led, founded or invested in by women be it in the media, service, retail, communication or any other industry, with a tech or internet angle, from Silicon Valley to Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia. A partner of Women 2.0, TheNextWomen is behind concepts such as Kitchen Dinners.

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