Second hand: clothing reseller Poshmark debuts on the exchange, Curtsy raises $11M

Online second-hand clothing marketplaces are gaining popularity, with giants like eBay and Etsy giving way to younger platforms. Can you guess what influenced the overall growth of the sphere?

The global pandemic and widespread lockdown have forced many brands to go online: the number of online purchases in 2020 was growing monthly. Today, the field of commerce is faced with questions of the fate of offline stores and the placement of accents in trade in general.

While brands are looking for an answer, American online reseller Poshmark went public and sold its first shares. Today the platform has 6.2 million active customers and 31.7 million users in total. Revenue for the first three quarters of last year was $192.8M, up 28% from the year before. Since the beginning of trading, the company has shown growth of 141%; trading began at $97,50 per share, and the total valuation when filing for an IPO was announced at $3B.

Poshmark’s competitor, the Curtsy project, recently raised $11M of Series A, and Index Ventures became the lead investor of the round. The total investment in the project to date is $14,5M. And if Poshmark only captures the audience of generation Z, then Curtsy makes the main focus of its business idea on it.

Curtsy’s mission is to provide the younger generation of shoppers with a more sustainable alternative to the traditional clothing shopping process. Reseller apps allow you to change your wardrobe without buying a new one all the time, which shortens the carbon footprint of shopping.

That’s not all. The founders of the project, having analyzed the process of reselling clothes online, including on the platform of their main competitor Poshmark, highlighted one of the main problems of independent reselling: to sell your clothes profitably, it is not enough just to take a photo, post it, send a box by mail — you need to become practically a marketer- self-taught and actively promote their products (Wired wrote about it last year). According to project CEO David Oates, ordinary women, the main audience of the application, are not faced with the task of becoming professional sellers, although the latter are often squeezed out of the market. That’s why Curtsy offers global support to aspiring resellers in the resale process, from prompts when uploading an item to the platform to sending it by mail — thus doing most of the work for them.