European Pre-Owned Kids Clothing Startup Percentil Acquires Germany’s Kirondo

In a move that sees some consolidation in the European ‘pre-owned’ kids clothing space, Spain’s Percentil has acquired Kirondo, which claims to be the leader in its home country of Germany. Both companies buy and sell ‘nearly-new” clothing, helping parents cash in on clothes that their kids have out-grown and barely used, and letting other parents clothe their kids at a discount.

If you have children, you likely already know the ‘hand-me-down’ model well. Startups like Percentil, or U.S.-based ThredUP, from which its model appears to be borrowed, essentially scale that process and turn it into a business in its own right.

“[The] key problem we solve is to give parents access to high quality kids fashion at heavy discounts,” Percentil co-founder and CEO Luis Ongil told me last year. “At the same time we allow them to easily monetize the lightly used clothes they have in their kids’ closets; kids grow too fast and their clothes stay behind sometimes unused, so we give this massive inventory an outlet and pay a fair price for those items we then sell in our e-shop across Europe.”

To that end, Percentil isn’t disclosing terms of its acquisition of Team Europe-founded Kirondo, although I understand it was an all-stock deal and that it is acquiring the entire company and all its assets, which includes 30,000 items of stock, website and brand. Furthermore, almost all of Kirondo’s 20+ staff are staying on post-merger, including two out of three of its founders. The German startup had raised €1 million to date from various European angels.

Talking up synergies between the two companies, Percentil says it plans to keep Kirondo operating as a separate entity, but one that will share stock and logistics, meaning that the combined property can be smarter about shifting clothes that go in and out of season at different times across Europe. In addition to Spain and Germany, the company also services France where it has a local competitor in the form of Patatam.fr.

Today’s Percentil news comes at the same time as Rebelle, which operates an online marketplace for second-hand designer fashion, has announced a “multi-million-Euro” Series B round. That’s particularly noteworthy as Percentil has recently expanded into women’s clothing, specifically in Spain but plans to add Germany and France in the coming weeks.