Ben Hemminger, CEO and co-founder of Fashionphile, says the company's specialty allows it to price items accurately and buy directly from sellers, taking on the resale risk itself.

Carlsbad

Fashionphile sources its ultra-luxury inventory by purchasing handbags, jewelry, and watches directly from individual owners, offering immediate cash buyouts and building strong relationships with sellers. The company differentiates itself from competitors by specializing exclusively in accessories from top brands and providing expert authentication for every item.

The CEO notes a significant shift in consumer attitudes toward secondhand luxury goods over the past two decades, with more customers valuing the price, variety, and sustainability benefits. Fashionphile has not faced significant pushback from luxury brands and employs a team of trained authenticators to ensure the trust and authenticity of its products.

Fashionphile CEO on differentiating in luxury resale

Talk me through how you source your items. When we're talking about ultra-luxury, scarcity creates value. So how do you actually bring them to your site? Thank you for having me. It's a great question. How we bring them to the site is through interactions with people like yourself and people who have bags themselves that they've bought. So we buy them directly from individuals from their closet, make you an offer, kind of a cash offer, a direct buyout up front, and then you send the bag in. And that's how we get our inventory. So in order to source all this great stuff, we have to have great relationships with handbag owners and jewelry and watch owners throughout the country. And how do you differentiate yourself from a RealReal, for example, which seems to offer something similar in that competitive landscape? I mean, how do you attract those folks that you need to have that relationship to come specifically to Fashionphile? Yeah, I mean, one, we're specialists in handbags and accessories. So the ultra-luxury brands, those classics, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Fendi, et cetera, we only do accessories. And we're experts in authentication. But there's another differentiator I think is really important to the customer is the direct buyout. So we actually offer your money up front. So you don't have to go through a consignment process or wait for it to sell before you know how much you're going to get. We'll just give you the money up front. It's your $2,000 or whatever. And you can go away and be done with it. So that's one unique differentiator is that specialty. And our specialty allows us to make really accurate direct buyout and take the risk ourselves of having to resell it. So Ben, I'm curious if you could just kind of talk about just kind of broader trends in this space, the idea that the idea of secondhand goods has sort of taken on a cachet that didn't always exist in the past. I mean, there's always been thrifting, always a certain cohort of people that were always willing to do that. But the amount of people, the percentage of people who are willing to sort of traffic in this space is really just phenomenal compared to what it was, I don't know, 20 or 30 years ago. Yeah. I mean, we have noticed that. We've been doing this like 20 some years. So we've kind of seen that change in the customer. But the thing that's happened is the customer has kind of realized all the benefits of pre-owned that maybe they didn't before. Like, it's not only the price benefit, but the optionality, the choice of all the different colors and styles that have been released over the last many years are all available today. And there's a circularity component. I think customers are prioritizing some of that sustainability and the circularity, and they're realizing they have value in their closet, and they can use that value to buy the newest things and just kind of keep refreshing. So I think it's just become they've realized how fun it is, how much choice they have, and how much their dollar, their bag-buying buck just stretches so much more when you're trading in and trading up constantly. I am curious. Have you ever received any pushback from some of the luxury brands themselves? I mean, how do they feel about all of this? Yeah. Not a direct pushback necessarily. We look at the brands as something like, we need them, of course. We want customers to keep buying straight from those brands, whether it's Chanel or Hermes or Louis Vuitton. We want them to buy that because that's how we get amazing things. They buy it, and then they sell it to us. And we think they also, the brands, do well with us in the market because we're putting money back into the hands of who? People who clearly are bag buyers. And so I think we're fueling some of that, the buying cycle to happen even faster. So there's quite a good synergy between the brands and us. There hasn't been a lot of pushback that we've noticed lately. Well, Ben, something I always wonder when it comes to luxury resale, ultra luxury resale, is how do you authenticate the bags that are coming into you? How can you verify that they actually are some of the brands that you're talking about? Yeah, I mean, that's part of the secret sauce of the business is that we have a team of trained authenticators who don't do anything except for handle each and every bag that comes in with a loop and sometimes an X-ray and using technology and experience to look at all the leather quality, the stitching, the smell even. And we just have trained experts that have years and years of experience looking at thousands of bags. And that's one of the reasons people shop from us is that trust and authenticity. And it does take time and a lot of training to get people up to be able to have that level of expertise.

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Breakdown