Amy Sinn has a closet full of clothes, shoes and purses that she hardly ever wears. Instead of letting them gather dust, she’s helping another women add variety to her wardrobe and making money at the same time. All this selling and buying Sinn does from home on poshmark.com. The website offers the chance to shop in other people’s closets.
With Poshmark’s mobile app, your closet becomes a discount-fashion warehouse. Real-time “Posh Parties” bring the limited-time-sale urgency of daily deals, but with a social flavor. By making clearing out your closet easy and fun rather than a tiresome, once-a-year chore, Poshmark is bringing entirely new inventory into the world of online commerce.
Menlo Park-based Poshmark, a mobile app where you can buy and sell those once-loved fashions languishing in your closet, is, as they say, on fire. Just this week they announced a $12 million influx of investor funding, and in their first year in business they’ve gone from facilitating about 50 sales per week to 350,000 sales.
Perhaps the thing that piqued investors’ interest the most for this big round was that Poshmark seems to have that “sticky” quality that makes people keep coming back. Chandra says the average user opens the app for 25 minutes a day and opens it seven to eight times daily, and that 70 percent of people who buy something on Poshmark end up listing something for sale on the marketplace as well.
Fast-growing mobile fashion marketplace Poshmark Inc. has raised $12 million to fuel its next growth spurt and better battle a lengthy list of competing startups also seeking to upend the fashion industry.