Tag : News

Vestiaire Collective, the French pre-owned luxury clothes marketplace, has picked up a $37 million Series D round as it aims to bed down on recent expansion to the U.S. and continue to expand to further European markets.

Leading the round is French investment firm Eurazeo, while previous backers, including Idinvest Partners, Condé Nast, Balderton Capital and Ventech, also participated. It brings total funding raised by the company to approximately $67 million since being founded six years ago.

Targeting high end fashion, Vestiaire Collective operates a marketplace for pre-owned clothes. However, unlike the likes of eBay, its model includes having a team of fashion experts who certify that every product is in good condition and items that don’t meet those standards are rejected — a model that is perhaps less scalable than a pure free-for-all marketplace, albeit one that ensures a much higher level of quality control for the items put on sale and the Vestiaire Collective brand in the longer term.

As we’ve previously noted, sellers need to physically send their items to the startup — then the company handles shipping to buyers. That creates infrastructure and human resource overheads in every country that Vestiaire Collective operates in.

With that said Spain’s Percentil, which primarily targets the kids market, operates a similar model, as does thredUP in the U.S., which, given that Vestiaire Collective crossed the pond last year, can be counted as a competitor.

Meanwhile, Vestiaire Collective, with offices in Paris, London, New York and Berlin, claims 4 million members and 100,000 new members joining each month across 40 countries. More than 20,000 new items are approved monthly, adding to a catalog of over 400,000 items, apparently. The French company says it is also on track to open offices in Italy and Scandinavia later this year.