Page 7 - 2019 SIPC Meeting Brief
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This venture funding is allowing companies
to take better advantage of advanced data,
machine learning and artificial intelligence
to aggressively grow their market share.
ThredUP in particular has teamed up with
the company Vue.ai to process items.
According to a Forbes article, artificial
intelligence allows them to “process
inbound items via image recognition
that enables automated visual tagging
and assigns attributions based on
necklines, patterns, label name, color, Today, there are more shoppers than
fashion edginess and more. ever before, with 64% of women willing
to buy secondhand – an increase from
Tapping into its extensive database, the
45% in 2016.
company uses AI-driven visual recognition
and includes attributes that define wear and Millennials and Gen Zers are adopting
tear enabling the company to assign resale secondhand quickly as well, with 29% and
value at scale for each one of its millions of 37% buying secondhand respectively in
unique items. This technology allows them 2019.
to process the 100,000 items a day it
receives and list 40,000 items daily to its Furthermore, consumers are becoming
two million item inventory. increasingly concerned with the ethical and
sustainable production of clothing.
According to the ThredUP 2019 Resale
Report, larger name brands are starting to Department Stores like Macy’s, Neiman
sell secondhand apparel in their own Marcus and JCPenney have begun to
stores, with 86% of retailers stating they partner with resale start-ups to sell used
want to test their resale business by 2020. items in their stores.
ThredUP recently announced a new
“resale-as-a-service” business line where
they are working with retailers and brands
to receive, process and price secondhand
goods for brands to offer for resale at their
own websites and stores. Other companies
like Yerdle have already been aggressively
expanding in this space managing
secondhand sales for Patagonia, Eileen
Fisher and REI, among others.
5 2019 STRATEGIC INITIATIVE PLANNING COMMITTEE BRIEF

