Sapna Shah

Sapna Shah General Information

Description

Ms. Sapna Shah is the Founder & serves as Principal at Red Giraffe Advisors. Ms. Shah is the Founder of Retail X Series. She serves as Board Member at NY Tech Alliance. She serves as Board Member at Modalyst. She serves as Advisor at VisuWall. She is a Board Observer of Stantt. She is also Advisory Board Member of TresseNoire. She is an angel investor, retail expert and three-time entrepreneur. Through Red Giraffe Advisors, she makes angel and early-stage seed investments in retail, fashion and consumer start-ups and offers advisory services to early-stage companies. Select investments include: The Wing, Message Yes, Stantt, Wondermile, Swoonery, Findmine, Modalyst, Monica + Andy and Iterate Studio. She is also the founder of Retail X Series, a retail startup boot camp program for pre-seed stage founders who are revolutionizing the future of retail. She has also served on the Board of Directors of New York Angels, one of the most active angel groups in the world. Prior to Red Giraffe Advisors, she co-founded and led Retail Eye Partners, a successful independent Wall Street equity research firm for eight years. At Retail Eye, she assessed the monthly and quarterly performance of major retailers in the specialty, big box and department store sectors through intensive channel checks and analysis. Simultaneously, in 2012, she co-founded a menswear e-commerce retailer, Mind the Chap, and led the Marketing and Web Development areas of the company. She also has over eight years of experience working for retailers in the specialty apparel and home furnishings sectors. Prior to the founding of Retail Eye Partners, she was Executive Director of Strategy and Customer Insight at Linens 'n Things, Inc. In this capacity, she was responsible for customer targeting and segmentation, market and consumer research, corporate strategic planning, new business rollouts and competitive benchmarking. Prior to Linens 'n Things, she was Director of Strategic Planning & New Business Development at Ann Taylor, where she worked on launching Ann Taylor's e-commerce site, developing a color cosmetics line, visioning the store of the future and improving store operations. She also has experience at Gap, Inc. Previous to her career in retail, she worked in investment banking at Punk, Ziegel & Knoell and at Morgan Stanley as a credit analyst. She received her B.S. in Economics from the Wharton School as well as a B.A. in East Asian Studies from the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her M.B.A. from Columbia Business School.