European pre-owned clothing startup Percentil has closed a €3.2 million Series A. Leading the round is Seaya Ventures, with participation from existing shareholder Active Venture Partners, and others. The company, which operates in Spain, France and Germany, plans to use the additional capital to increase its pre-owned clothes inventory, as well expand to two further, as yet undisclosed, European countries.
Founded in 2012, Percentil’s original mission was to help families save money while buying and selling kids pre-used clothing, but has since expanded to women’s clothing — similar to U.S. startup ThredUp from which it took inspiration.
The focus remains the same: offering high quality apparel. The Spanish company does this by buying “nearly-new’ clothing and then offering up those items through its own online store, sharing a cut of the sale price with the original owner.
Like ThredUp and European rival Vestiaire Collective (which recently closed a hefty $37 million Series D), Percentil doesn’t operate a pure peer-to-peer marketplace. Instead its model sees the startup takes care of all the logistics, such as pick up and delivery, and, crucially, quality control, ensuring the whole process for buyers and sellers is as frictionless as possible.
“[The] key problem we solve is give parents access to high quality kids fashion at heavy discounts,” Percentil co-founder and CEO Luis Ongil told TechCrunch 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, in March Percentil acquired German competitor Kirondo, significantly increasing its stock and adding an fulfilment center in Berlin with 25 members of staff, as well as picking up sellers and shoppers in Germany and Austria.
Meanwhile, the company says it currently delivers 70,000 items in more than 10,000 orders per month, and that over 75,000 consumers have bought or sold items through Percentil and Kirondo.