On this week’s episode of the Electric Runway podcast, fashion tech journalist Amanda Cosco takes you inside Silicon Valley to speak with Tracy Sun, co-founder of Poshmark.
Up until this point on the podcast, we’ve explored fashion from a wearables perspective. We’ve spoken with garment engineers, fashion designers, and hardware startups who have helped us imagine a future where our clothing is embedded with sensors, micro-controllers, and haptic feedback. Today on the show, we’re going to SHAKE IT UP a bit and talk about retail tech.
Like fashion tech, retail tech is at the intersection of fashion and technology. Where fashion tech deals with technologies worn on the body, retail tech hones in on how fashion and technology intersect with commerce.
What excites us about retail tech, is that it’s all about the way we shop, and innovative companies are laying the groundwork for the way we’ll shop in the future.
No company embodies the retail tech revolution quite like Poshmark. Poshmark is a leading platform for buying and selling fashion. The app invites you to shop the closets of women across America and enables you to sell items from your closet as well.
We all know that fashion is fickle: trends change, so does your style and size. We can all relate to buying a dress or a pair of shoes, wearing them once or twice, and then having them sit in your closet collecting dust.
While Poshmark may have emerged as a pioneer of Recommerce—that is, the reselling of goods online—today, four-and-a-half years later, the company has its sights set on something much bigger.
Today on Poshmark, one in five items sold is brand new. Recently, the company launched a new feature that connects power users to brands. Select members are now able to purchase products from brands wholesale and sell these items in their showrooms.
In addition to providing a marketplace where women can resell our clothing, Poshmark also enables women to learn the skills needed (such as merchandising and marketing) to run an online store.
The thread throughout Poshmark is female empowerment through fashion, which makes this episode appropriate to share this week—on the heels of International Women’s Day.
