Curtsy, an app that lets women buy and sell clothing, shoes and accessories from their phones, announced that it has raised $11 million in Series A funding. The funding, led by Index Ventures, will enable Curtsy to scale, build out a team and continue to gain market share.
“The giants in the clothing resale space have been around for a while and haven’t done a great job appealing to casual sellers or keeping up with the times,” said Co-Founder David Oates. “Most apps focus on closet clean out, ignoring the Gen Z use case of rotating their wardrobe.”
Curtsy was founded as an app for women in sororities to rent dresses from each other. After a successful first semester at Ole Miss, Curtsy applied and was accepted to Y Combinator. The company quickly expanded its presence in campuses across the country and launched shipping to allow rentals between schools in early 2018. The team realized that the most requested feature — to buy and sell clothes instead of just rent — was the bigger opportunity. The app has grown 10 times since 2019 and is facilitating tens of millions of dollars in transaction volume. In October 2020, Curtsy facilitated the sale of 85,000 items, an increase of 35% since September.
“Consumer-to-consumer e-commerce, first pioneered by eBay, continues to be unbundled. Dedicated platforms are rising that have a tighter relationship with their users and that facilitate more frictionless ways to transact a certain type of good. Curtsy has accomplished exactly this for young women and their desire to buy and sell clothing. Never before have we seen such a strong overlap between buyers and sellers on a consumer-to-consumer marketplace. We believe the incredible love for Curtsy is indicative of a large marketplace in the making,” said Damir Becirovic of Index Ventures.
Despite the proliferation of resale apps over the last decade, the status quo is still dropping off bags of clothing at Goodwill — 20 million tons of clothing still end up in landfills each year. In part, this is because existing clothing resale apps demand a lot of work from users in order to sell. Sellers have to figure out how to best merchandise and price their items, grow their audience and manually fulfill orders. As a result, existing apps are primarily used by professional sellers who are more profit-driven than casual sellers. There is no app focused exclusively on Gen Z women, the fastest growing segment in the space.
