Online consignment shop for women’s clothing, Twice, has made the move to mobile, starting first with a dedicated app for iPad, out now. The company, founded in 2012 and backed by $4.6 million in outside funding, was already seeing over half its emails opened on iPad, indicating a need to better address users on this platform with a native experience. Now that the app is live, the company expects it will drive around 25% of all revenue post-launch.
Along with Facebook ads, Twice emails are an important part of the company’s marketing strategy, and the company has invested in building their own automation tools in-house. Its personalized “New Arrivals” daily emails now account for account for 40% of Twice revenue, says co-founder co-founder Noah Ready-Campbell. It makes sense that Twice would want to send those opening their emails on iPad directly to a native iPad app, too.
The company competes in the same space with ThredUP, Poshmark, Threadflip, 99Dresses, and others that invite women to resell their gently used clothing for extra cash. However, it’s most similar to ThredUP among this group, because it doesn’t offer a peer-to-peer marketplace, but rather an online store where users send in items directly to the company itself. Once there, the clothing is then reviewed, measured, photographed and placed online for sale.
The main difference between Twice and ThredUP is that the former tends to carry more upscale brands, and has always allowed sellers to accept or reject the offer made for their clothing. ThredUP in the past had donated or discarded items that don’t meet its standards, which has sometimes been an issue for them on the customer service side of things. (People can tend to overvalue what their things are worth, so it can be better to err on the side of transparency here).
On iPad, Twice’s app offers the same features as you’d find on the web, including the ability to request a free shipping bag, print a prepaid shipping label, browse through merchandise for sale, and zoom in on large images of product before adding items to a cart. That cart, meanwhile, is now shared between web and mobile, so users can more easily move between devices and pick up where they left off. The app is clean, well-designed, and has an iOS 7 look-and-feel, which makes it enjoyable to use.
According to Ready-Campbell , the company has seen over 500% revenue growth this year, and has grown to 118 employees over the 20 it had last year. Twice also now offers 23,000 items for sale on its site, up 200% from the 8,500 it had a year ago.
The company actually built the Twice app in-house, the team is proud to admit. After receiving quotes of $200,000 for an app that would arrive in four months’ time, they instead built it in two and a half months for less than half the price. “I think it speaks to the quality of our engineering team,” says Ready-Campbell.
Now that the iPad app is live, the team will tackle iPhone next, then Android. And the company itself is working to expand into women’s accessories, then kids’ and men’s clothing over the longer-term.
Twice for iPad is available in the iTunes App Store here.