Poshmark is opening its clothes closets to business-to-business e-commerce.
The online fashion marketplace launched its Boutique wholesale section on Feb. 11, connecting fashion brands to retailers that sell on Poshmark.com, CEO Manish Chandra says.
The Boutique section, at Poshmark.com/brands/boutique, has been in test mode since October with 50 fashion brands selling to retailers that operate retail storefronts on Poshmark.com. These retailers then sell the apparel and accessories to the “millions of shoppers” registered on Poshmark, the company says.
T&j Designs, a jewelry designer, has sold out the inventory it listed on Poshmark 13 times since it started selling its products as a beta tester on the Poshmark Boutique in December, T&j CEO Tiffany Ishiguro tells B2BecNews. Ishiguro declines to disclose the total number of products she sold. Poshmark would not say how many wholesale products are available overall.
Poshmark Boutique is both a mobile site and app. Users spend on average about 25 minutes a day on its mobile app, and visit it eight times daily, the company says.
Wholesale selling marks a change for Poshmark, which was founded in 2014 as a peer-to-peer marketplace for second-hand apparel and accessories. Although most of the items sold at retail through Poshmark.com are used fashion products from consumers’ own closets, Chandra estimates that Poshmark sellers acquired about 20% of those items from wholesalers to resell them on Poshmark. That inspired Poshmark to launch a wholesale section of its site.
“Unlike traditional marketplaces, Poshmark helps shoppers discover new products and brands through a deeply engaged community of sellers who also act as stylists for their customers,” Chandra says. “Because we prioritized social connections above all else, we have built a massive fashion platform that now has the capacity to change how brands connect with consumers. By partnering with our unique social selling network, brands can now market and distribute their products to millions of shoppers in an instant.”
Poshmark restricts access to the Boutique to sellers on Poshmark with 10 or more items for sale on the site, an average buyer’s rating of 4.5 out of five, and a completed retail certification. The retail certification program schools sellers on copyright law, sales tax and “other things they need to be aware of before becoming a micro-entrepreneur,” Chandra says.
Poshmark’s in-house developers built the wholesale portal in about six months, the company says. Within the quarter, it plans to add brands located outside the United States to the wholesale portal, and within the year plans to open up the portal to global buyers.
The company declines to specify the per-transaction fee charged to brands selling wholesale through the mobile app, but says it is more than the 10% fee charged to sellers on the consumer marketplace. Poshmark says it has raised $40.5 million in venture capital funding.
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