Hitha Prabhakar

Pranahitha "Hitha" Prabhakar (born November 23) is a New York-based author, investigative reporter, on air correspondent and retail analyst. She is the chief research officer of AitchPe Retail Advisory and author of Black Market Billions: How Organized Retail Crime Funds Terrorists, published by FT Press.

Early life and Education
Prabhakar was born in New Haven, Connecticut, while her parents were attending medical school at Yale University. She moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico when she was three years old. She graduated from Smith College with degrees in Philosophy and Economics and spent a year at the London School of Economics. In 2006, she received her masters degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Career
In 2011 Prabhakar joined Bloomberg Television as a correspondent covering retail and consumer spending. Before joining Bloomberg Television, She was founder and principal of The Style File Group, a retail consulting firm based in New York City, where she served as an advisor to hedge funds and other clients with long term holdings in retail companies and was an on-air contributor covering retail and consumer spending on CNBC.

From 2006-2007 Prabhakar was the style writer for Forbes and Forbes.com. Prabhakar covered the luxury industry as well as men’s fashion. Before she joined Forbes, she had a brief stint as a stylist and market editor for MTV where she styled numerous celebrities such as Samuel L. Jackson, Brooke Shields and musicians such as M.I.A., Britney Spears, Chris Cornell, Death Cab for Cutie, Sean Kingston, Weezer and the Pussycat Dolls for Vogue Magazine’s Fashion Rocks. She has written for Time, People, People.com, ELLE India, Mashable, Metro Newspapers, Nirvana Women, Inked magazine and Zink magazine.

Other TV references and magazine features
She has had numerous television appearances as a retail analyst for Fox Business News, Fox News, Sky News, Fox Radio Network, foxnews.com, Bravo, CNN, CBS, Univision, E! Entertainment television, Reuters and as the host of Emmy winning New York based show Cool in Your Code, which airs on WNBC and WNYC TV. In 2009, she was a coach for the MTV series “MADE.”

Prabhakar has been featured in Glamour magazine,, Marie Claire, Oprah magazine, Lucky magazine, Gotham, Albuquerque Living, The Daily News, Metro, The Daily Mail, Style.com, CNN.com, Huffington Post and has been a guest on NPR lending her style and retail knowledge on everything from the state of the retail industry to which diamonds will be on the red carpet during the Oscars. Most recently she was photographed and profiled for the Burberry “Art of the Trench” campaign. She has also served as a judge for the prestigious Swiss Textile Awards in Zurich Switzerland as well as the Supima Cotton Design Contest in New York City.