Startup Spotlight #118: Thryft
Thryft is a curated marketplace for the best secondhand clothing & accessories from thrift & vintage stores.
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I got the chance to speak with Capri Wheaton and Sam Yang, cofounders of Thryft, about what they working on at their startup, and any advice they have for emerging entrepreneurs.
Thryft is a curated, controlled marketplace for secondhand clothing and accessories.
Wheaton, the CEO, has thrifted the vast majority of her clothing and accessories ever since she can remember. She loves the thrill of the hunt for a unique item and knowing that she is shopping in a more environmentally conscious way. Wheaton was studying political science and philosophy and UC Berkeley when she realized the detrimental environmental impacts of the fashion industry. 26 billion pounds of clothing end up in the landfill each year! Then, she knew she wanted to make an impact in this space.
Yang, the CTO, is a hacker, designer, and avid thrifter. He built an AI-doppelganger-finder app called Doppel with over 120,000 registered users. Yang also wrote, produced, recorded & released 5 songs on Spotify. He was studying CS at UC Berkeley but was always building or hacking on something, so when Wheaton approached him about Thryft, he was convinced immediately.
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Startup Spotlight: Thryft
Problem: The process of selling unique items on social platforms like Instagram is a 6-step process where sellers have to switch between multiple platforms like Instagram, Pirate Ship, & Venmo. Shopify doesn't serve them because it takes a long time to update their unique, constantly changing inventory- which is a big problem since these sellers are selling hundreds of items a week.
Market: Secondhand shopping is a rapidly growing trend and market. The secondhand market is projected to grow from $28 billion to $64 billion by 2024 (stat from ThredUp).
Solution: Our product simplifies the process of selling unique items on social media platforms by automatically generating a website from their Instagram page and making it easier to sell over Instagram live. The future of e-commerce is on personalized channels like Instagram, and we're building the infrastructure for that growing market.
Team: Sam and I started Thryft as freshmen at UC Berkeley, and after discovering our passion for building and coming up with creative, hacky solutions, we dropped out to pursue Thryft full time. We are currently participating in Y Combinator's W21 batch.
Recent Success:
Wheaton and Yang: We've been successful at learning and iterating quickly. Last fall, we launched the first version of Thryft: a marketplace for clothing directly from brick-and-mortar thrift and vintage stores. We were solving a legitimate problem by digitizing brick-and-mortar thrift stores that were struggling during the pandemic. However, we had to manually onboard stores in person. Because of this, we saw no path to scale from our first 10 stores to 30 or 50 stores- let alone thousands. We learned very quickly that we couldn't scale that business and pivoted to building a more seamless solution for selling unique items on social platforms.
Recent Struggle:
Wheaton and Yang: One thing we struggled with while previously doing the marketplace idea was onboarding supply. After our pivot away from working with brick-and-mortar stores, we wanted to scale our supply quickly so we could validate our business. We decided to web scrape high-quality listings from Depop and Etsy sellers and then approach them later with sales numbers and proven demand in order to convince them to formally join Thryft. This strategy was partially inspired by how Grubhub web scraped 150,000 restaurants (initially without their knowledge) to expand their supply. After about a month of this, we grew our weekly GMV by 5x and had made many of our sellers’ hundreds of dollars in sales. We then decided to approach them for partnerships.
Unfortunately, most of these sellers were not too happy about us selling their items without their knowledge, despite us acquiring them sales and customers they wouldn't have had otherwise. Some sellers went as far as to flame us publicly or threaten to sue us. Because of this, we ultimately decided to pivot away from this strategy and try pitching sellers directly. In hindsight, we should have just done this to start out with. With our new platform, we've been successful so far at reaching out to sellers on Instagram to get them to use our product.
Founder Advice:
Wheaton and Yang: Get out of your head and get an outside perspective! Sometimes when you're too close to the problem, it seems more difficult than it really is. There could be a simple solution that you're missing because you're too close to the problem. Build a network of advisors and other founders who you can run things by and ask for feedback. Our peers in YC have helped us reach many aha moments!
Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:
Wheaton and Yang: Here are three founders you should check out next!
Vera K., Founder of Neverland: Neverland allows you to experience the magic of the outdoors anywhere.
Nick Y., Founder of Superpowered: Superpowered is a calendar app in your menu bar. See your daily schedule and join meetings without having to go to your calendar.
Anthony Thumpasery, Founder of Parsagon: Parsagon allows anyone, regardless of their technical background, to scrape data at the click of a button.
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