About ThredUp
ThredUp is transforming resale with the mission to inspire a new generation of consumers to think secondhand first. By making it easy to buy and sell secondhand, ThredUp has become one of the largest resale platforms for apparel, shoes, and accessories. ThredUp is extending the life cycle of clothing, changing the way consumers shop, and ushering in a more sustainable future for the fashion industry.
How ThredUp Works
As a managed marketplace, ThredUp buyers and sellers trust ThredUp to deliver value, selection, and quality. ThredUp provides end-to-end resale services for sellers, including pricing, merchandising, fulfillment payments, and customer service. This convenience enables a generation of new sellers to easily participate in resale, unlocking a massive supply of high-quality clothing for a new generation of buyers. In 2018, we extended our platform to enable brands and retailers to easily participate in the resale economy.
Sellers
thredUP takes items that had minimal value and were sitting idle in closets, and creates value for sellers in a convenient, eco-friendly way. Sellers order a Clean Out Kit, fill it, and return it to us using our prepaid label. We take it from there and do the work to make those items available for resale.
Buyers
Our marketplace delivers shoppers great brands at great prices in an ever-changing assortment, creating a fun shopping experience. Each item undergoes quality inspection, and buyers love shopping value, premium, and luxury brands all in one place, at up to 90% off estimated retail price. (1)
Brands
72% of retail execs have said they are interested in testing resale, but traditional retail and e-commerce are not set up to handle the complexities of resale. (2) thredUP’s Resale-as-a-Service (RaaS) enables brands like Walmart, GAP, and Reformation to deliver modern resale to their customers.
Our Operating Platform
The foundation for ThredUp’s managed marketplace is our custom-built operating platform, giving us the ability to process more than 100,000 unique items per day. Built for “single SKU” logistics, this platform consists of distributed processing infrastructure, proprietary software, and data science expertise. Example technology includes: machine learning and artificial intelligence to power visual recognition, multi-layered algorithms to determine resale prices, and automatic photography that can produce hundreds of thousands of photos a day. This infrastructure is powering the rapidly emerging resale economy, the fastest growing sector in retail. (3)
Positively impacting closets,
wallets, and the planet.
The fashion industry is one of the most environmentally damaging sectors in the global economy. By extending the life cycle of millions of garments, ThredUp’s scalable, resale business model is a solution to the fashion industry’s wastefulness.
