Milda Mitkutė, James Reinhart, Julie Wainwright, Manish Chandra, Simon Beckerman and Thibaud Hug de Larauze on making used goods worth trusting.
6 Resale Economy Founders Making Secondhand the First Choice
Case 1
Vinted began with a student's overflowing wardrobe, thredUP with a rack of unworn shirts, and The RealReal with a dot-com founder's second act. This page follows six resale economy founders who turned used goods into a mainstream market, what made buyers trust them, and what each paid along the way.
Resale has moved from the margins of retail to one of its fastest-growing parts. The 2026 Resale Report, conducted by the analytics firm GlobalData for thredUP (one of the companies below), projects the global secondhand apparel market to reach $393 billion by 2030, growing twice as fast as overall apparel retail, and the U.S. market alone to reach $78.8 billion. In 2025, by thredUP's account, the U.S. secondhand market grew nearly four times faster than the broader retail clothing market.
The founders below built that shift. Each had to get supply out of closets and drawers, persuade strangers that a used item was what it claimed to be, and move it cheaply enough to leave a margin. They're listed by founding year, and each case shows the friction, the fix that worked and what it cost.
Case Study #1: Milda Mitkutė and Justas Janauskas, Founders of the Secondhand Clothing Marketplace Vinted
A student wardrobe with nowhere to go
In 2008 Milda Mitkutė, then 22, was moving into small student accommodation that had no space for her old clothes. At a house party in Vilnius she explained the problem to Justas Janauskas, a programmer, and the two decided to build a website to sell her surplus clothes. Within a few weeks the first version of Vinted was live.
Snapshot
Founder | Milda Mitkutė, with Justas Janauskas |
Company | Vinted (founded 2008, Vilnius, Lithuania) |
Model | Peer-to-peer marketplace for secondhand goods, with its own shipping and payments arms |
Scale | 2025 revenue of €1.1 billion on €10.8 billion of gross merchandise value |
Philosophy | Make secondhand the first choice |
By 2016 Vinted was a former high flyer that had fallen on hard times, with offices in San Francisco, London, Munich and Paris and about 240 staff. Its later chief executive, Thomas Plantenga, described the position bluntly: "The business was completely burning down." Two of its venture investors had written the investment off to zero.
In May 2016 one of Vinted's investors asked Plantenga, a Dutch marketplace entrepreneur based in New York, to help. He planned to stay five weeks and never flew back. The austerity plan was severe: the four foreign offices closed, headcount fell from 240 to 150, content moderation was automated, and the company concentrated on two core markets, Germany and France. It also replaced a mandatory sales fee with a free product and optional paid extras.
The turnaround began with about $14 million in the bank; in 2018 Vinted raised €50 million, at the time the biggest round ever for a Lithuanian startup.
A €128 million round in 2019 valued the company at more than €1 billion, making it Lithuania's first unicorn.
In 2025 revenue rose 38% to €1.1 billion and gross merchandise value rose 47% to €10.8 billion, with net profit of €62 million.
The rescue came from subtraction: fewer offices, fewer markets and no compulsory fee for sellers.
Results
Plantenga later said that anyone who has had to "fire half of the people of a company" never wants to do it again, and that he had told the management team they would be "dead in nine months" if nothing changed. Mitkutė went on maternity leave in 2016, leaving the company to Janauskas and its new group chief executive, and by 2018 the stake held by the founders and executive team had fallen below 50%, though they kept board control.
Lessons & Playbook
For Mitkutė and Janauskas, the lesson was cost discipline.
Key takeaways:
A product people love can still sit on top of a business that is burning cash.
Making listing free for sellers can grow supply faster than advertising.
Concentrating on two markets beat being present in many.
An outside operator can save a company its founders could not.
Case 2
Case Study #2: James Reinhart, the Founder Who Turned thredUP Into an Online Thrift Store
A shirt swap that grew into managed resale
In early 2009, while still a student at Harvard Business School, James Reinhart was running a stealth pilot of thredUP: a peer-to-peer swap for men's long-sleeve button-down shirts in the $70 to $90 range. The idea came from getting dressed one morning and skipping over a dozen shirts "for like the 300th time." He recruited Oliver Lubin, an old college roommate, and later Chris Homer, a classmate, as chief technology officer.
Snapshot
Founder | James Reinhart, with Oliver Lubin and Chris Homer |
Company | thredUP (founded 2009, now based in Oakland, California) |
Model | Managed online resale: thredUP processes sellers' clothes and sells them on its own marketplace |
Scale | 2025 revenue of $310.8 million and 1.65 million active buyers |
Philosophy | Inspire the world to think secondhand first |
The clothes-sharing site for men and women launched that September, and seven months later, after only lukewarm success, the founders pivoted. "We were building a new idea on a new platform with an unproven team," Reinhart said, and the company turned to family and friends for its first money.
Children's clothes gave thredUP a category where forced obsolescence guaranteed a steady stream of customers. By April 2013 it was again offering women's apparel, and by December investors had put in some $23.1 million. The larger change was operational: thredUP stopped asking members to trade with each other and took on the work of selling, through its own processing infrastructure.
thredUP priced its IPO at $14 a share in March 2021, raised $168 million, and closed its first day nearly 43% above the offer price.
In 2025 revenue rose 20% to $310.8 million, with a gross margin of 79.4%.
The company has processed more than 200 million unique secondhand items from 60,000 brands.
The model scaled once the company took over the seller's work.
Results
thredUP lost $47.9 million in 2020, the year before its listing, and $20.2 million from continuing operations in 2025. Its accumulated deficit stood at $576.1 million at the end of 2025. An expansion into Europe was reversed: in December 2024 thredUP divested its European business, Remix, through a management buyout led by its general manager, Florin Filote, keeping a minority stake after a final $2 million cash investment. That business accounted for a $37.0 million loss from discontinued operations in 2024. Only in 2025 did thredUP report positive annual total cash flows, of $3.1 million, for the first time in its history.
Lessons & Playbook
Reinhart built the managed-marketplace model, where the company does the selling.
Key takeaways:
A category with built-in turnover, such as children's clothing, can prove demand early.
Taking work off the seller grows supply but adds cost to every item.
International expansion should wait until the home market pays for itself.
High gross margins do not guarantee a net profit.
Case 3
Case Study #3: Julie Wainwright, The RealReal and a Luxury Resale Business Built on Authentication
A dot-com survivor who sold trust in luxury
Julie Wainwright took Pets.com public in 2000 and shut it down later that same year, when the dot-com bubble burst. For nearly a decade, she recalled, recruiters told her no one was going to hire her. She founded The RealReal instead and built what CNBC in 2019 called the world's largest marketplace for authenticated luxury consignment.
Snapshot
Founder | Julie Wainwright |
Company | The RealReal (founded 2011, San Francisco) |
Model | Luxury consignment: takes possession of items, authenticates them, and sells them online for a commission |
Scale | $2.1 billion of gross merchandise value in 2025 |
Philosophy | Authentication is the product |
Cowen Equity Research estimated that $200 billion worth of U.S. luxury goods were available for resale, but a buyer of a used handbag had to believe it was genuine. The RealReal built its identity on that doubt, promising "an expert behind every item" and telling customers that everything it sold was 100 percent real.
Sellers mailed in luxury goods or dropped them off at its stores, and the company inspected and resold them, taking a commission of 35% on average. By its 2019 listing it had 1,700 employees, 100 of them dedicated to authenticating goods, and it had paid out $987 million to consignors.
Revenue rose 55% to $207.4 million in 2018.
On June 28, 2019 the company sold 15 million shares at $20, raising $300 million; the shares closed at $28.90, valuing it at $2.4 billion.
In 2025 it delivered $2.1 billion of gross merchandise value and its first year of positive adjusted EBITDA in every quarter.
Owning the inspection step made authenticity a service buyers would pay for.
Results
In November 2019 CNBC reported, after interviewing nearly three dozen former employees, that not everything was authenticated by an expert, that copywriters had been tasked with authenticating some items, and that ready-to-wear copywriters worked to quotas of 105 items in an eight-hour shift. The shares closed that day down nearly 11%, and Chanel was already suing over what it alleged were counterfeit bags. In June 2022 Wainwright stepped down, effective immediately, after losses of $236.1 million in 2021. She had set a goal to surpass $5 billion in gross merchandise value by 2025; the company reached $2.1 billion. She later called her removal, by board members she had recommended, a "power play" by an investor.
Lessons & Playbook
Wainwright turned trust into a service people would pay for.
Key takeaways:
In luxury resale, verification is the core product.
A claim of 100% invites scrutiny of every exception.
Throughput quotas and inspection quality pull in opposite directions.
Public targets set in a boom become the yardstick for a founder's removal.
Case 4
Case Study #4: Manish Chandra, Poshmark and the Fashion Resale App Built Around Sellers
A phone-first marketplace built around sellers
Manish Chandra's first startup, Kaboodle, was a social shopping discovery platform. In 2010, six months before founding Poshmark, he told the investor who would lead his first round that he was going to give up his laptop and work only from his phone. Mayfield led the Series A in February 2011 and introduced him to Tracy Sun, a fashion industry insider.
Snapshot
Founder | Manish Chandra, with Tracy Sun and two other co-founders |
Company | Poshmark (founded 2011, Redwood City, California) |
Model | Social marketplace where people sell from their own closets; Poshmark takes a cut of every sale |
Scale | 31.7 million active users and 4.5 million sellers at its 2021 listing |
Philosophy | Community is the moat |
Fashion, in the words of Poshmark's lead investor, was a multi-trillion-dollar industry that had barely touched technology. Raising venture rounds from a primarily male investor community was not always straightforward for a women-focused social marketplace. An early conflict with the U.S. Postal Service over its postage model added friction.
Chandra built Poshmark around what he called social commerce, in which buyers and sellers can chat casually about items. A bundled logistics model, with one price and simplified shipping, removed the biggest barrier to selling. It also paused growth to reinvest in the platform, a move unpopular with investors.
In the first three quarters of 2020 revenue rose 28% to $192.8 million, with a profit of $20.9 million against a loss of $33.9 million a year earlier.
Poshmark priced its IPO at $42 in January 2021, above its $35 to $39 range, for an initial valuation of more than $3 billion.
Its shares ended the first day of trading up more than 141%, against a last private valuation of nearly $600 million in 2017.
Social selling built a supply base competitors could not easily copy.
Results
In October 2022 Naver, the South Korean internet company, agreed to buy Poshmark for $17.90 a share in cash, an enterprise value of about $1.2 billion. The price was 57% below the $42 IPO price, and Naver noted that Poshmark had reported a wider-than-expected quarterly loss that August. The deal closed in January 2023, and Poshmark became a standalone subsidiary still led by Chandra.
Lessons & Playbook
Chandra's bet was social commerce.
Key takeaways:
Designing for the phone first can be an advantage before investors accept it.
A loyal seller community is a supply moat.
A pandemic sales surge is not a new baseline.
A first-day share price says little about the eventual exit value.
Case 5
Case Study #5: Simon Beckerman, the Magazine Founder Who Made Depop a Gen Z Resale Marketplace
Simon Beckerman co-founded PIG, an Italian magazine on fashion, music and design. In 2011 he founded Depop at H-Farm, a technology incubator near Venice, as a way for the magazine's readers to buy products they discovered through its editorial content.
Snapshot
Founder | Simon Beckerman |
Company | Depop (founded 2011 at H-Farm, Italy; now based in London) |
Model | Mobile-first peer-to-peer fashion marketplace |
Scale | About $1 billion of gross merchandise sales and 7 million active buyers in 2025 |
Philosophy | Community comes first |
In Beckerman's account, compelling mobile marketplaces did not exist in 2011, and the established ones were not looking after the underground, creative communities his magazine served. "Marketplaces were utilities," he said.
Depop became a mobile-first, highly visual platform where users could list, style, promote and sell their own items directly to one another. From the magazine Beckerman brought influencer marketing, which he called the main thing when Depop started. Under Maria Raga, chief executive from 2016, Depop became closely associated with Gen Z fashion culture, vintage shopping and independent sellers.
In 2021 Depop was sold to a U.S. marketplace for $1.625 billion.
In 2025 its gross merchandise sales reached about $1 billion, including nearly 60% year-over-year growth in the U.S.
Depop closed 2025 with 7 million active buyers, nearly 90% of them under 34, and more than 3 million active sellers.
The product turned resale into self-expression, and that is what younger sellers came for.
Results
Beckerman stepped down as chief executive in 2013, two years after founding, and joined the board; Raga later brought him back to help articulate the brand. In February 2026 Depop's owner agreed to sell it to eBay for about $1.2 billion in cash, more than $400 million below the 2021 price, after less than five years of ownership and despite sales growth. The deal completed on July 30, 2026, the company's second change of ownership in five years.
Lessons & Playbook
Beckerman's model put culture first.
Key takeaways:
An audience built in media can become a marketplace's first supply.
Brand and community can hold their own against larger marketplaces.
A founder who steps aside as chief executive can still shape the brand from the board.
Sales growth does not protect a price set in a boom year.
Case 6
Case Study #6: Thibaud Hug de Larauze, the Refurbished Electronics Marketplace Founder Behind Back Market
In 2014 Thibaud Hug de Larauze was digitizing retailers' catalogues and placing their products on large online marketplaces, and one client was a refurbisher. Visiting its production site, he found what the company later described as a secret treasure chamber of devices rebuilt by people with enormous expertise, which the market simply classed as used goods. That year he founded Back Market in Paris with Quentin Le Brouster and Vianney Vaute.
Snapshot
Founder | Thibaud Hug de Larauze, with Vianney Vaute and Quentin Le Brouster |
Company | Back Market (founded 2014, Paris) |
Model | Marketplace for professionally refurbished electronics sold by about 1,800 partner refurbishers |
Scale | 2025 revenue of €440 million and 18 million customers |
Philosophy | Make refurbished electronics the first choice for tech purchases |
Refurbished devices were often half the price of new, but buyers did not know which sellers to trust. Before 2014 the category was a little-noticed niche, and no warranty was offered. A company spokesperson described the stigma: buyers assumed that "the consumer is left on their own if their used product fails."
Back Market built a system buyers could trust by aligning every refurbisher to its own grading, and by offering a minimum one-year warranty and a 30-day return policy. It tracks the share of faulty devices, about 4% against an estimated 3% for new ones, and has added a premium tier certified as repaired only with official parts.
In January 2022 a $510 million Series E valued Back Market at $5.7 billion, months after a $335 million Series D.
By September 2024 it had sold 30 million refurbished devices to 15 million customers.
In 2025 it reached profitability worldwide for the first time, on revenue of €440 million, after a first profitable year in Europe in 2024.
Standardizing the grade turned 1,800 separate refurbishers into one brand buyers could trust.
Results
Back Market raised its largest rounds when money was cheap, then the economy slowed. At the start of 2023 it put in place a departure plan for about a hundred employees, close to 15% of its workforce, and its valuation has stood at €5 billion since 2022. Profitability came twelve years after founding. Hug de Larauze conceded that it had long carried the label of an impact company, where "the money is not there." In June 2026 he announced that he would step down as chief executive at the end of August, handing the role to Clément Petit, chief financial officer since 2020, and remaining executive chairman.
Lessons & Playbook
Hug de Larauze won buyers over with one standard and a warranty.
Key takeaways:
In a fragmented supply base, the marketplace's standard is the product.
A warranty can close most of the gap between used and new.
Capital raised at peak valuations has to be grown into later.
A founder may hand operations to the finance chief once profit becomes the goal.
Conclusion
All six companies grew by subtraction. Each founder took away one specific reason people avoided secondhand trade. Vinted removed the seller's fee, thredUP removed the seller's work, The RealReal removed the fear of fakes, Poshmark made selling sociable, Depop made used clothes a statement for younger buyers, and Back Market removed the risk of a dead device. Each fix moved cost from the customer to the company, and each business worked only once it could carry that cost at scale.
Every one of them paid a price. Vinted nearly ran out of money, thredUP and The RealReal were still loss-making more than a decade after founding, Poshmark and Depop changed hands below their peak prices, and Back Market took twelve years to turn a profit. Founders paid in control: Vinted's founders brought in an outside chief executive, Beckerman stepped aside, Wainwright was pushed out, Chandra sold the company while staying on to run it, and Hug de Larauze is handing operations to his finance chief. A business plan for a resale company has to show where trust is created, who pays for it on each item, and how many years of losses the model needs before volume covers that cost. Those three answers decide whether secondhand becomes the first choice or stays the cheaper one.