alarm:clock

Web 2.0 - Friday, July 20, 2007

Allen & Co Backs Online Doll Trend

The white shoe NYC media investment bank Allen & Co. which just wound up its annual big shot meeting in Sun Valley has invested in a startup called Cartoon Doll Emporium. Cartoon Doll Emporium enables user (probably young girls) to create dolls and customize them with clothes and accessories in a drag and drop interface.

Cartoon Doll was founded by Evan Bailyn who says his site gets more than 4M unique visitors, 90M page views each month.

Cartoon Doll was founded in 2006 and appears to be a knock-off of the European site Stardoll, which was well funded by Index Ventures.

UPDATE: Cartoon Doll's founder and CEO gets in touch to take issue with our characterization of Cartoon Doll as a knock-off of Stardoll. We certainly appreciate the pride he takes in his business. Our statement was really meant to reflect the view that the big bunding of Stardoll opened the doors for funding of other companies like CartoonDoll. Index Ventures took a lot of arrows in its back by comenters who wondered why they would invest millions in a doll site. But Stardoll has proven to be a success and we suspect this gave heart to the investors of Cartoon Doll at Allen & Co. Our comment was not meant to imply that Cartoon Doll stole creatively from Stardoll. Indeed, the sites are very different.

View - site
Read - Mashable story