News

Marketplace for beauty services raises close to $300k worth of investment
2014
Jul 31

Venture capital group Practica Capital has invested in a fast-growing online community TOKIA.LT – a localized marketplace for beauty services. The platform is putting focus on user-generated beauty looks and products. Exact amount of the investment has not been disclosed.

Free of charge marketplace enables users to find make-up artists, nail-art, hairdressing and other beauty specialists by discovering their beauty looks, video lessons, product reviews or schedule a visit using personal messages.

The project aims to flip the process of selecting decorative cosmetics when instead of choosing the image of the product you discover the beauty looks and later on the products tagged to them. Such feature also enables users to browse through different looks created by different users where they have used the same product providing much broader impression of the possible final result. 

TOKIA.LT has launched less than a year ago and the community has grown into more than 13,000 members. Users are able to choose the beauty specialist from more than 300 registered professionals across Lithuania.

"Finding a reliable and trustworthy professional for your special occasion is very challenging. Therefore, we strive to provide the opportunity for professionals to visually present their talents, build up the reputation and interact with their audience directly. At the same time we are able to provide users with a variety of choices in services and cosmetics in one place "- says R. Tumasonytė, TOKIA.LT marketing manager.

The young company is on the hype of planning the foreign growth. Such countries as France, Italy and Spain are considered as the next target market due to the exclusive interest in decorative cosmetics, beauty expenditure and social online activity among young females. Those seem to be the highest in Europe.

"The investment will be devoted to a systematic improvement of the product and development of new functionality when expanding to foreign markets," – said Vygintas Ankudavičius, co-founder and CEO of TOKIA.LT.

"We believe that TOKIA.LT has the potential to revolutionize the process of making decisions related to beauty services and cosmetics. Young females are looking for the answers to everything online, therefor the solution provided by TOKIA.LT is relevant for the girls all over the world. " – states Petras MICIŪNAS, partner at Practica Capital.

TOKIA.LT team has participated in this year's Baltic Progress Conference LOGIN. They were considered to be one of the 5 most promising teams participating in Startup Fair and were financially supported by the most successful Lithuanian startup VINTED. LOGIN Startup Fair hosted the total of 54 startups from Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and Belarus.