NiftyThrifty, an online, pre-owned, vintage clothing store, announced today that it has raised $2 million from Tribeca Venture Partners, Signal Ventures, Greycroft, idealab and Howard Morgan.
The Brooklyn-based company will launch in October as a membership website that sells vintage clothing. The company will target women exclusively at first, but will follow with apparel for men in a few months.
Topper Luciani, the company’s President, came up with the idea and pitched it to current CEO Mark Kingdon last year. Kingdon has been the CEO of Organic, Inc. and Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life, and an angel investor in Twitter and other companies.
Luciani was frustrated by the limitations of eBay and saw an opportunity to offer customers curated vintage clothing. The duo had three “very successful” flash sales on Fab.com. Kingdon says they learned a lot about their market from those sales.
Kingdon says the company will curate collections of 50-100 vintage pieces centered around themes (think holiday or weekend getaway, he tells me). NiftyThrifty will email users starting once a week then once a day then multiple times a day, as well as posting a thousand discoverable pieces on the site, with an average price around $50.
“We think it’s really important to have a daily dialogue with our consumers,” Kingdon tells me.
He adds that the company initially only set out to raise $1 million, ended up raising twice that and could have raised “a lot more.”
Kingdon notes that “the opportunity is massive,” citing statistics like an overall apparel market upwards of $300 billion and and $15-18B market for used clothing in the U.S.
He says their initial target audience is 18-34 year olds with “an urban style” and an appreciation for vintage clothes but lack of access to quality brick and mortar stores.
The company is currently sourcing merchandise and arranging it into collections in preparation for its October launch.