Page 7 - 2019 SIPC Meeting Brief
P. 7

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
   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10