It’s not that often that Kim Kardashian gives shoutouts to French startups — so when in 2016, the US influencer posted to X (then Twitter) that she was “obsessed” with luxury secondhand marketplace Vestiaire Collective, the Paris-based company took it as a major badge of honour.
That being said, says cofounder Fanny Moizant, “we have loads of stories like this”.
Launched in 2009 when Moizant, who had just finished a degree at the French Institute of Fashion (IMF) teamed up with former stylist Sophie Hersan and four other cofounders, Vestiaire Collective has come a long way.
In 15 years, the company has raised more than $560m, reaching a $1.7bn valuation in 2021 when it bagged a $210m round led by SoftBank.
That was when tech companies’ valuations were “at their highest,” says Moizant, and since then the company has had to revise the numbers down. Last year, Vestiaire Collective raised $3.6m as part of a crowdfunding operation that valued the company €1.1bn ($1.13bn) pre-money — $600m less than three years earlier, but enough to keep it in France’s select cohort of unicorns.
And despite fierce competition from companies like Lithuania’s €5bn unicorn Vinted, Vestiaire Collective is positive that it will achieve profitability this year — with the next step shaping up to be an IPO.
Designer items
Vestiaire Collective launched with a focus on high-end fashion, says Hersan, who alongside Moizant is the last remaining original cofounder still working at the company. Hersan is the company’s fashion director while Moizant has taken on the role of president, alongside CEO Maximilian Bittner.
The idea was prompted by the accumulation of designer items in Hersan’s own wardrobe (“Gucci 90s and things like that,” she tells Sifted) against the backdrop of a rapidly growing fast fashion industry.
“We wanted to extend the life of products, but focusing on high-quality products,” says Hersan.
Vestiaire Collective launched with an authentication service that Hersan says was a unique differentiator at the time, and which enabled the company to become a trustworthy intermediary between buyers and sellers.
The platform includes upper-market high-street brands like Maje and Sandro, all the way to Chanel, Hermès and Dior — but “never featured fast fashion brands”, says Moizant.
Moizant says that this is how the company has managed to secure unpaid partnerships with a dozen luxury brands such as Burberry and Chloé, through which clients are encouraged to sell their pre-owned items on the platform — as well as to convince users ranging from fashion editors to models through influencers (and Kim Kardashian).
This is what differentiates Vestiaire Collective from competitors like Vinted. Moizant says that with an average order value of €350 Vestiaire Collective doesn’t play in the same league as its Lithuanian counterpart, where items from all brands list for as little as €1.
Vestiaire Collective vs Vinted
With 75m members in dozens of countries in Europe and North America, Vinted remains a much larger player. Vestiaire Collective’s crowdfunding page indicates that the platform had 800k buyers in 2023; Moizant says that there are now “millions” of members.
The French company doesn’t share its latest revenue figures, but the crowdfunding page discloses that it brought in €157m in revenues in 2023, with EBITDA losses of €77m. In comparison, Vinted’s revenues hit nearly €600m in 2023; the Lithuanian unicorn reached profitability that year and posted over €75m in adjusted EBITDA.
Vinted has also been branching into luxury fashion after acquiring designer secondhand specialist Rebelle in 2022 — and in 2023 it launched an item verification service to authenticate designer second-hand items.
Meanwhile in the US, luxury secondhand marketplace The RealReal, which IPOed in 2019, has a market cap of $1bn and last posted a revenue forecast of up to $602m in 2024. The RealReal reached profitability in 2023.
Moizant points to the fact that Vestiaire Collective has been growing at pace for the past few years. Sales on the platform, which the company takes a commission fee from, grew 25% in 2023 compared to the previous year — “compared to 4% growth across the luxury industry,” says Hersan.
The scaleup is present in 70 countries with the US, where Vestiaire Collective acquired competitor Tradesy in 2022, representing 20% of sales.
“We’ve reached a critical size, and we’re within an inch of profitability,” says Moizant.
The road to IPO
When Vestiaire Collective launched its crowdfunding campaign in 2024, it said that it would “continue to gain market share, reach profitability, and then an IPO is on the horizon.”
It certainly resonated with users: over 3,200 investors bought shares in the company (of which 57% were women), amounting to €3.5m ($3.6m) raised.
Moizant says that the campaign was launched because the scaleup wanted to give members a chance to acquire a stake in the company, rather than to test the public’s appetite for buying shares.
“An IPO is still our ambition, but it is not a short-term project,” says Moizant. “The IPO market remains difficult and we are concentrating on our operations.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/vestiaire-collective-interview/
