California Apparel News

Poshmark, the social marketplace where people in the United States can buy and sell clothing, announced the launch of its new Posh Markets feature, which has added on refined shopping communities within the platform.

By launching six unique shopping experiences—women’s, men’s, kids’, boutiques, plus-size offerings and luxury—Poshmark is helping to guide its tens of millions of members toward specific apparel listings offered by the platform’s “Seller Stylists,” who currently number more than 4 million.

“The number of available listings at any given point in time recently crossed 75 million. As we keep scaling, by next year we expect the number to be hundreds of millions of listings,” said Poshmark founder and Chief Executive Officer Manish Chandra, whose company is headquartered in Redwood City, Calif.

With this inventory growth, Poshmark has also grown with the types of products its shoppers are demanding. Also, the opportunities have increased to sell a greater variety of goods through different “Seller Stylists.”

“We’ve been broadening our platform to take it away from just women’s resale to women’s retail and boutiques, men’s, kids’ and, also, plus sizes and other specific communities that exist within the Poshmark platform,” Chandra said.

With its foundation as a social marketplace, 80 percent to 90 percent of Poshmark’s traffic originates through its mobile application. Its members often spend approximately 25 minutes each day looking through the various offerings on the platform, which they open seven to nine times and can result in one of the Poshmark sales made every second.

During their search for specific apparel, members often want to weed out any products that aren’t tailored to their needs or style preferences. The launch of Posh Markets was part of the natural evolution for Poshmark’s technology, as Chandra explained the shopping ease these six new markets provide.

“What Posh Markets do is really create an alternative experience,” he said. “[It’s] super innovative, based on technology that behaves as if you had multiple apps on your phone, each of them focused on that community, except you don’t have multiple apps on the phone. You have a single app on Poshmark and you can switch between these apps by switching between Posh Markets.”

With current figures showing Poshmark’s “Seller Stylists” uploading $100 million in inventory every week and sharing 14 million items each day through the traditional platform, the site is now positioned to grow each of Posh Market’s communities individually.

“When you engage with the platform, there is an overarching ‘All’ category, which takes all of the inventory that you have, which is exactly the same as the core experience,” Chandra said. “When you go to any of the specific Posh Markets, it focuses on a specific inventory and experience.”

Once a shopper chooses a certain Posh Market and moves through the platform to an individual closet of a Poshmark “Seller Stylist” or one of the platform’s parties, which are held four times each day—such as its recent Sunday Funday party—only products relevant to the chosen market will appear. Considering how this new technology will change social commerce, there is potential to transform how consumers shop throughout the year for specific seasons and events.

“We can launch temporal markets,” Chandra said. “You could see us creating a Posh Market around Coachella, which is primarily the boho style, and that market maybe lasts for a month and we take it down. These become huge immersive apps without having to launch a new app. They are packaged up and appear within the app, so you can switch to these more immersive experiences.”

Prior to the July 24 launch of Posh Markets, the system was tested with the help of select “Seller Stylists” and members. While Chandra notes a consistent positive impact across the six Posh Markets, a few of the previously underserved categories reported a surge in traffic.

“We saw the men’s, boutiques and luxury had a huge impact,” he said. “Part of that is that those things were not being highlighted, whereas women’s, kids’ and plus sizes were already being highlighted in the core market. So what you see is that those things saw a boost.”

Looking toward the future of Posh Markets, Chandra sees the potential to also transcend geographic boundaries through building regional markets, such as those that would serve members in Canada or Australia. Reflecting on Poshmark’s evolution over the course of the seven years since it was founded in 2011, Chandra notes the potential for Posh Markets to afford access to different groups that have not been fully represented through e-commerce.

“What we are really doing here is giving the ability for any community to dynamically come together and form a Posh Market and for us to highlight it,” he said. “This gives us the ability to tackle communities that exist who may not have a large-scale platform and we can give them a way to connect and shop.”