Copious, The eBay With A Social Backbone, Expands Into Menswear And Art

Copious, the a San Francisco startup that makes a socially-powered online marketplace for buying and selling things, has catered to a primarily female audience since it launched last year. But today, the company is stretching out a bit: Copious is expanding to offer menswear and art.

As part of the expansion, Copious has also tweaked its design to be a bit more gender-neutral, co-founder Jonathan Ehrlich said in an interview this week. Also for today’s launch, the company has partnered with celebrity stylist Brad Goreski, who will be selling men’s clothing, bags and accessories from his closet on Copious (the initial proceeds will be going to charity.)

According to Ehrlich, this wider reach has always been part of Copious’ plan. “We’ve always been about trying to make this experience organized around each person — people first categories second,” he said. “To start, we had to build with a focus in one category, but now we thought it was an appropriate time to stretch our legs.”

Copious, which debuted in April 2011, is an eBay-like marketplace for people to buy and sell things that provides personalized shopping feeds to each user based on preferences gleaned from social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. The feeds get more personalized the more someone uses the site.

Copious is keeping specific details close when it comes to user numbers, transactions, and revenues, but Ehrlich said the company has “hundreds of thousands of users” and has sold “thousands and thousands of things” to date.

Of course, Copious is not the only fresh-faced startup in the fashion marketplace space. Threadflip and Poshmark are also social platforms for people to buy and sell stuff. Ehrlich says that Copious is unique because of the personalized experience that it delivers to each user. “These other sites are still a top-down driven curated experience, where the experiences themselves aren’t social and don’t change based on who I am,” he said. “Our experience is incredibly different… I’d compare what Copious is doing more to the Pinterests, Spotifys, and Gogobots of the world.”

Earlier this summer, Copious closed on a $5 million Series A funding round, bringing its total venture investment to $7 million from backers including Foundation Capital, Embarcadero Ventures, The Blackberry Partners Fund, and Google Ventures. The company has 17 employees. At the time of that funding, we spoke to Copious’ co-founder and CEO Jim Rose for TechCrunch TV — you can watch that interview below: