Sometimes ordering secondhand clothing online is a little sketchy. Is this shirt going to smell awful? Will there be inexplicable stains?
ThredUP, a marketplace for used apparel, is hoping to offer consumers a more premium experience by individually vetting each item of used clothing sold through its site.
The San Francisco-based company just raised an $81M Series E round led by Goldman Sachs Investment Partners. ThredUP has raised over $125M to date.
“We’re excited to partner with thredUP,” Ian Friedman, co-head of GSIP Private Investments said in a press release. “Our industry research revealed a huge opportunity to change consumer behavior around both shopping and selling secondhand apparel.”
Right now the service focuses exclusively on women’s and children’s clothing, and has managed to process a whopping 11 million items to date. How does it sort through so many items? Well, they have an army of employees helping them in their two East and West coast facilities, each with over 125,000 square feet of space.
James Reinhart, CEO and co-founder of thredUP, told me that the company intends to use this new funding to continue to expand its operations to meet customer demand.
Reinhart believes that the company has an opportunity to give consumers a more trusted marketplace to shop for used clothing.
“We founded thredUP to make it incredibly convenient for consumers to clean out their closets and shop for quality secondhand clothes,” Reinhart said in a release. “We saw a huge opportunity to leverage Internet penetration and the growing acceptance of buying and selling online to bring a delightful, frictionless secondhand experience to the masses.”