Poshmark is a mobile and social marketplace where women buy and sell clothing and accessories 100 percent through their mobile phones. Founded by Manish Chandra in 2011, his goal was to build a virtual marketplace that mimicked the social way women shop in real life. With Poshmark, Manish built a simple, yet addictive mobile app to bring women together around their mutual love of fashion and making real human relationships.
Before Poshmark, selling items from your closet was a hassle and the process was cumbersome and daunting. With the launch of Apple’s iPhone 4, Manish saw the perfect opportunity to create a fun and simple way to buy and sell fashion where women to take beautiful pictures of items in their closets and easily share them - all from the palm of their hand. He jumped on this opportunity and focused 100% on mobile to create a platform where women’s closet’s turned into stores that were open and in the pockets of millions of other women 24/7. By snapping a quick pic of the item they want to sell, women can set up their virtual closets in less than 60 seconds. To make it even easier, Poshmark takes care of everything on the backend, including managing transactions, providing shipping labels, customer service, and most importantly, connecting buyers and sellers who share a mutual love for fashion.
With millions of women using the app and hundreds of thousands closets open for sale, Poshmark has empowered women, making it possible for them to sell and shop no matter where they are, resulting in an addicted community of users. The average Posher opens the app 7-8 times a day and spends 20-25 in the app daily. Women upload over $1 million worth of inventory from their closets every day - that’s an entire Nordstrom’s worth of inventory every 2-3 weeks.
As a result, Poshmark has over 5,000 brands in its marketplace to shop from, and has become one of the largest shopping destinations for women’s fashion. With so much merchandise to choose from, Poshmark is building new technology for women to easily discover items in the app, pioneering a smart, personalized shopping experience based on the tons of social and commerce data that is compiled every second. Women can shop curated showrooms based on their preferences and find their “style mate” by connecting with other women with similar likes and activity.
Poshmark is also combining the online and offline shopping experiences by hosting real-time parties, called Posh Parties. Women gather in the app in real-time to buy and sell within certain themes or designers. Posh Parties happen three times a day, seven days a week across multiple platforms -- at any given moment a party can have over 50,000 people simultaneously sharing and shopping in real-time.
By building a complex, yet easy-to-use marketplace that acknowledges how shopping is inherently a social experience for women, Poshmark has successfully brought together a highly engaged fashion community who love shopping from each other’s closets. Because of Poshmark’s innovative vision and technology, women can come together in real-time to shop and focus on the fun aspect of buying and selling while Poshmark handles all the heavy lifting on the backend.