Samuel Spitz is a lover of second-hand clothing, but finds himself spending hours searching dozens of resale sites to find specific items and finding himself shortchanged.
“The market is very fragmented with all the sites,” Spitz told TechCrunch. “And once I got on a site, it was really hard to find what I was looking for, plus you only see a fraction of what’s actually out there. Often times what I want isn’t available right away, in my particular size, or at my target price. I search, search, search every week, spending hours doing it because I love finding the deals.
That’s when he got the idea to merge those second-hand listings together under one umbrella. In the year In March 2021, Spitz joined forces with fellow Rice University alumnus Kunai Rai to launch what was loosely called “Amazon for Secondhand,” formerly Wearloom, which allows consumers to shop from one place on multiple sites, including Poshmark, Depop, and eBay. .
The company’s first “technology” was a form that people would fill out to describe what they wanted, and Spitz and Rye would manually compile the search results and respond by email. By the end of the first month, the couple was serving 500 to 600 people daily and by the second month, it had grown to thousands.
After all those manual searches became too much to keep up with, they began building what is today a central platform for online second-hand shopping.
Currently serving tens of thousands of users daily, the company has partnered with sites such as eBay, ThredUp, Vestiaire Collective, Rebag, Grailed, GOAT, StockX and TheLuxuryCloset so users can search, filter and receive alerts from second-hand clothing sites. It will gently make a percentage of the sales it drives to those sites.
Quiet second hand clothing marketplace Image Credits: Gently
“It’s similar to how a kayak works for travel,” Spitz said. “We also bring in new customers who have never shopped with them before.”
In May, ThredUP reported in its 2022 Resale Report that the global secondhand clothing market is expected to grow by 127% by 2026, three times the size of the overall global clothing market. In the US alone, the secondary market is expected to grow by 32% by 2021 and more than double over the next four years to $82 billion.
In addition to those already listed, there are many marketplaces and startups working in this space, including Olive, Archive, Curtsy, Rebag, and Treet, which have received some venture capital funding in the past couple of years. Spitz sees its closest competitors as Lyst and ShopStyle, which is a Rakuten brand.
It was today’s turn to announce its new capital round of $2 million in pre-seed funding, which includes more than 20 investors including Jason Calakanis Startup, Bloom Tech’s Austen Allred, Shutterstock’s Jon Oringer, RXBar’s Peter Rahal, Dorm Room Fund and V1. V.C.
Spitz expects to increase the number of daily users to 1 million by 2024. It plans to deploy the new capital into technology development, improve search, launch an SMS function and create a scale function where users only need to enter their scale once. The company is hiring more people to join its six-person workforce and expand from fashion into other categories, including home furnishings. He is looking at Series A in 2023.
He added: “The reason most people don’t shop online is because it’s time-consuming and there’s a lot of friction. “We can help those companies drive more sales and get more people to buy.”
