MINI BIZ IDEA: the pre-loved fashion white space, market-- & insurmountable challenges.
The state of the union (vintage, resale and pre-loved) today... 👗
If I could FIX one category of business, it would be the pre-loved and vintage clothing world.
Vintage and used clothing is infinitely more popular than it was a decade ago— look at The RealReal, ThredUp, Rent The Runway, ForDays, Nuuly, ByNext, By Rotation, Vestiaire Collective, Croissant, Gently, Trove, CaaStle, Grailed, Bill Gates’ daughter’s new start-up, many more— all real and successful businesses, B2C and B2B, built exclusively around the used or shared clothing value prop. This is an economy of its own now.
We’re finally living in an era where you can screenshot an outfit or an item that you see on an influencer or in a magazine and reverse image search it to find vintage or used options that are similar. Hallelujah. Lines for vintage stores here in NYC are down the block if a single TikTok video about them goes viral. (RIP to my local haunt, Stella Dallas, which is now unbearable to go to, but kind of always was too crammed with stuff to enjoy shopping at.)
Brands like J.Crew, Doen, La Ligne, Stella McCartney, Clare V and Madewell now have options to click over to shop used items from their assortment, wisely keeping their used clothing sales under the brand umbrella and within their universe as opposed to a dirty little secret or separate market.
Despite all this, people are buying more new clothing in droves. The clothing they’re buying is shittier quality. It’s ending up in landfill, or flooding thrift stores and ThredUp with cheap quality goods. Fast fashion sites like Cider and Shein need a real challenger.
If I had the muscle, I would do this. I love clothes, I love shopping, I love ecommerce. I hate feeling like a bull in a china shop in a tiny vintage store where all the clothing is sized to fit on my pinky finger and nothing much bigger. I also hate the feeling I get when I do closet clean outs and see how little of what I own actually has resale value, the lack of which is essentially the harbinger of an inevitable life sitting in a landfill, contributing to the rapid erosion of what little chance we have left at avoiding almost certain demise as a planet.
From where I’m sitting, there’s a white space:
All these resale sites have this kind of clunky user experience that is nowhere near as smooth as a website where you’d buy new clothes
The lack of real editorial or imagery or any sort of curation (dirty word that I don’t believe in but will allow here) means shoppers have to go in knowing exactly what they’re looking for, which means you rarely window shop
No sort of (actually good) customer loyalty program. This is not an issue on a cheaper site like ThredUp, where clothes are priced so cheap they seemingly have almost no value at all, but is a huge problem when you’re shopping for designer stuff— shouldn’t you have a white glove experience if you’re spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on a single item? Where else would you drop this much money in exchange for no perks or VIP status at all?
Fashion girls know that the place to be is eBay— but you have to know your keywords and your saved searches like the back of your hand, meaning once again, you do all the curatorial work. There’s nothing wrong with this, it’s how personal style works! That said, it’s a missed revenue opportunity if someone could figure out how to do it right, and shopping eBay and Etsy (though less so Etsy!) is maybe not the best user experience on the shipping and returns front, which is a problem when you’re buying apparel that may not fit.
There are also a myriad of challenges with the model I don’t know how to solve:
Inventory comes and goes so quickly that photographing it on-model or with any sort of steaming, styling or enhancing (so it doesn’t look wrinkled and, well, used) does not make any sense. The unit economics don’t allow for that kind of expenditure, which is part of why the shopping experience sucks.
It’s hard if not impossible to shoot or curate some sort of edit or editorial without being able to drive people to actual tangible products that won’t sell out instantly. It’s also hard to figure out what to even curate based on inventory that turns over so quickly. Do you go old school and hire a creative? Do you go new school and use AI and algorithms to curate? I know which one of the two options investors would be more likely to back…
Some of the typical mechanisms that power ecomm businesses become useless when you have shallow inventory— if a customer snaps a pic of themselves in a great top that they bought on your vintage marketplace/site and their friends or followers clamor to try to find or buy one themselves, you don’t necessarily win the sale or another customer. Word of mouth is good, but cash in your pocket from a sale is better.
I’d love to see an actual vintage marketplace with scale that doesn’t go out of business and isn’t beleaguered. (Interlude: a congratulations and sigh of relief for The RealReal, who reached profitability last quarter with an adjusted EBITDA of $1.4M or 1% of revenue.)
I’d love to see the ease of user/customer experience so strong that it gives Shein and Cider a run for their money— I’m talking Nordstrom or Shopbop or Net-a-Porter quality of experience. Watching Rent The Runway and The RealReal (well, maybe no longer?) get clobbered in the public markets probably makes this an impossible ask— it’s so incredibly unlikely that the unit economics back out here and I get what I’m dreaming of.
Remember what Nasty Gal had in its vintage days? Where it felt fun and not too serious? I am missing that.
I think it’s fun when people have pet projects or business needs/ideas they wish someone would just take the ball and run down the field with. This is mine (I have a few others!1 This is one newsletter where I am burying the sexiest bits in the footnotes.)… tell me yours in the comments if you have any on your mind. 🤝
If this space is interesting to you, here are some resources I really like that feel honest and transparent and REAL:
Affiliate links but for regular people, all people. Basically a universal referral program, like Skimlinks for regular people, so when you recommend something to a friend you actually get credit/a kickback for it. If this existed, I don’t know if we’d even bother with influencers. Maybe this is a cry for help or recommendations for affiliate platforms that integrate smoothly into Substack… More so, though, word of mouth is still the best and most interesting driver of velocity for businesses and from a business operator’s standpoint, it’s virtually impossible to manage word of mouth attribution and to double down on your best brand evangelists/the customers who drive the most trial for you. This mechanism would absolutely change that and the way people allocate marketing budgets forever, and regular people would finally see the upside when they turn a friend or coworker on to something that actually is good.
A roll-up of all of the different fitness influencers and boutique fitness classes in one handy, single-subscription platform. I would go around and buy these up the way Dear Media snapped up all podcasts under the “women’s interests” umbrella and sold ads into them as a unified podcast network. Think of all the different subscriptions you have to pay for— Melissa Wood Health, Megan Roup, Sky Ting, just as a few examples— and then how much better it would be if you could access a bunch of these creators at once in the same app or platform instead of each influencer having their own walled garden/universe that requires so much set-up on your end (and theirs!). The fitness influencers could then do what they do best: create content. I’d do all the business stuff (making them money) and UX stuff (making working out easier and more fun). Then Peloton would buy the business as a bid to help them stay relevant and own the largest market share in this space, and the business would benefit from the natural and obvious synergies there.
If you come for any of these, I will find you, and I will sue you, and I will win! I have an absolutely excellent lawyer.
Andreesen Horowitz team, if you are reading this, I am available to knock these business ideas out of the park.
I love this breakdown. You clearly state the challenges and I do agree, there has to be some ways to improve. It's the balance of figuring out the unit economics with the improvements. Glad you are sharing the struggles so hopefully we can see some improvements. Thanks for sharing my recent post on retailers that integrated resale into their business model.
I love all these ideas! Also, I am 50 and I have yet to find my Levi’s I found in my 20s at a flea market that were like five bucks and they were amazing! Ghosts of Levi’s past.