How Can Grailed Become A Favorite Resale Platform For Consumers?

Every Thursday is a big day for street faithful in the world.

On this day, Supreme will launch new products in 11 stores and websites around the world.

Just a few minutes before the new sale, all kinds of robot programs are waiting to buy new products together with fans outside the Supreme's outdoor queue. Most of these products have entered a lucrative second hand sale after they have been bought.

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Here, the price of the product is up to several times that of the original retail price.

Many new products eventually flow into a website called Grailed.

"Every time Supreme is new, there will be a large number of buyers coming to Grailed," Jacob Metzger said.

Co founder and marketing director of trading platform.

In Grailed, the number of Supreme listing products will soar 265% every Thursday, usually about 40000.

According to the statistics of online second-hand store ThredUp,

The value of the resale market will reach US $33 billion before 2021.

Although eBay still takes up 90% of the market, the scale of resale websites such as Vestiaire Collective and The RealReal, which were established in 2009 and 2011, are also increasing, but the main audiences are women.

Grailed is to grasp the market blank and aim at the group of "millennial generation" male consumers who are queuing up outside Supreme.

"At that time, there was no real third party trading platform to facilitate people to buy and sell goods," said Jeff Carvalho, executive director of North American cultural publication Highsnobiety, "you have to go to Styleforum and Superfuture forums to discuss the theme of men's clothing and then trade there."

Nevertheless, the business of these network forums has not been very large.

Buying and selling rare secondhand clothing is also popular with eBay and Facebook platform groups. However, such platforms lack special maintenance, and there is no aesthetic experience and shopping experience.

Raf Simons 2003 spring summer series jacket

"I learned my own programming and started Grailed in December 2013," recalled Arun Gupta, co-founder and chief executive of Grailed. At that time, the market of second-hand designer men's wear began to grow, and he saw the business opportunities of supply and demand of Unicom. "I asked everyone's ideas at the forum to see what new functions added to become more cool."

Together with Metzger and chief technology officer Julian Connor, Gupta moved its first corporate headquarters from New York to New York.

First, a round of financing was carried out in a small circle of friends and relatives. In 2015, Thrive Capital's seed money was obtained, and the amount of financing was not disclosed.

"Grailed" was originally a street slang, referring to the discovery of extremely rare goods.

The website with this name also hit the hearts of millennial loyal collectors for selling rare second-hand men's products, such as Raf Simons x Peter Saville 2004 autumn winter men's series of Parker coats ($8000), Rick Owens alligator leather bicycle jackets ($30000), or even Hedi Slimane all private Saint Laurent sheared coat (priced at $11000).

But Grailed also offers products of relatively low price, such as Off-White and Nike sneakers, or Acne Studios, Champion and other products that are suitable for everyday wear.

According to the world clothing shoes and hats net, the Grailed of the website that has been built up to now (GMV) has increased more than twice a year, and this year it has reached about US $100 million.

The website has a 8.9% Commission on sales, and the annual revenue is expected to be above $9 million.

In contrast, Vestiaire Collective, The RealReal and other resale websites provide authenticity, pportation and packaging services, drawing 20% to 40% Commission.

Grailed has kept operating costs and commissions at a low level, but it is far from summarizing the methodology of website operation.

"We mainly do" three C ", that is, Curation and Content, and Community," explains Metzger. "Gupta added," at the very beginning, we hope that the website will be able to maintain any interest in anything you see. "

At the beginning, Gupta and Metzger constantly combed the entire website, deleted the unauthenticated posts, and later hired a part-time verification team. The members were distributed in different regions of the world, specializing in checking the flow of trade posts and managing the news flow of the website. The products were divided into four categories: Grails ("rare goods"), Hype ("hot argument"), Sartorial ("Western clothes and leather shoes") and Core ("basic single product").

But the basic planning and editing of products is not enough.

Metzger said that in 2016, in order to make the company "feel less skinless", Grailed launched a special planning Dry Clean Only (dry cleaning only), through the interviews of important fashion circles, popularizing the Master and Class contents of major brands and important products, and better user education.

"We do the content, mainly because of two points," Gupta said. "First of all, we can tell and explain the history and process behind the brand.

Second, we can show our brand and show our taste.

This is also related to our editorial maintenance of websites, telling people what we think is cool.

We want to tell them that we love fashion, too.

Introducing editorial editorial content is a clever way to promote sales.

"Grailed has done a good job in this respect," Carvalho said. "The old online retail mode assumes that when you open your website, you know what you are looking for.

What they are doing now is to wrap up the story around you for the products.

In addition, content itself is a key tool to stimulate Grailed user interaction.

At the beginning of its founding, Grailed was not just a trading platform, but a whole community.

Metzger said, "what we want is that if we can prove to the users that the creator of the website is also the same group with them, this will inspire them more enthusiastically.

That is to say, this is a platform created by the good people for the same good.

In addition to content, Grailed also nurture the community by soliciting contributions, emphasizing the personality of the seller, and even recruiting employees directly from users.

"We hope that our entire thinking process will bring them in," explains Metzger. "We want to create a loyal user base, and users consider themselves the participants of the whole game, belonging to a larger culture beyond this website."

Under such guidance, the website's interaction participation has been greatly improved.

According to the digital market consultancy SimilarWeb (its data is not complete but the overall direction is accurate), in February 2018, the number of independent visitors per month of Grailed has just exceeded 2 million 100 thousand, compared with The RealReal 1 million 300 thousand and Vestiaire Collective 1 million 100 thousand.

In addition, the website also organizes offline community activities in Losangeles, Toronto and other places, launching the annual "Grailed 100" special fashion sales activities. The Grailed team can directly contact and absorb the feedback from fashion enthusiasts.

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Grailed is also working with industry partners to further develop the community. Partners include Fear of God's Jerry Lorenzo, model Luka Sabbat and designer Robert Geller, and users can directly select enough second-hand clothing from their idol wardrobe.

"Grailed is successful because they have special abilities to find the right people to cooperate, to get the best products, and to use the best technology to empower the website," said Nick Ten, director of Forty-Five Ten Menswear, who co worked with Grailed in March 2017.

Grailed activities held at 424 Fairfax, Losangeles

Let A$AP Rocky, Virgil Abloh, Kendall Jenner and others visit the Grailed New York office to buy second-hand clothes. They also bring more exposure to the website and increase their credibility in the street corner.

"Building a community is ultimately about building trust," says Carvalho of Highsnobiety.

In this way, Grailed has a lot of work to do.

Although there is a relatively large team of inspectors, it has indeed omitted the real link of goods. The sale of fake goods and swindling sellers is the two most serious criticisms of Grailed.

"These two points are behind us and our competitors.

We can't guarantee that everything on the website is up to the seller's description, but we are launching a project against sale, "Metzger said.

"Another challenge is to expand the scope of the hot money market," Gupta said. "Grailed is a website for all people. But at present, the setting of the website determines that users who can not name the brand are very difficult to find the products they want.

If we can lower the threshold of the website, it will also increase the seller's sales, which is also good for us.

To achieve this goal, Grailed plans to collaborate with influential people outside the fashion circle, such as restaurant chef, actors, athletes and artists.

But members of the Grailed core community remain the core of future growth strategies.

The website team plans to further expand the user profile function. People can upload photos of their own try UPS, view favorite products, open video terminals, and interact with each other more easily (Grailed now observe 28000 users daily to discuss paction notes).

"In the future, we hope to make the user profile more powerful, just like in social media such as Twitter and Instagram," Gupta said.

At present, there are only avatars and authentication icons connecting PayPal accounts to users.

"The key is to preserve the Internet Forum culture of the same old people in the old age."

More interesting reports, please pay attention to the world clothing shoes and hats net.