Building the infrastructure for the resale economy, meet Flyp
At Afore, we are big fans of companies that both do good for society and are great businesses in and of themselves. Flyp is a perfect example of this! Flyp is led by James Kawas and Dani Arnaout, both Forbes 30 under 30 honorees and former Mercari executives on a mission to prevent $200B worth of clothing from ending up in landfills by using AI to power distribution for resellers around the world.
It’s no secret that a massively diverse array of industries experienced disruption through the pandemic. One particularly striking and less-discussed transformation, however, was that of the resale economy. Reselling goods isn’t exactly a new phenomenon, as evidenced by the past success of marketplaces like eBay and StockX, but the pandemic brought a new wave of entrants to the space– particularly in secondhand clothing.
As people increasingly turned to the web for clothing purchases, there was a spike in demand for a digitized thrift store experience. Companies serving this function have experienced a boom in usage– accompanied in many cases by lucrative exits. Depop was recently acquired by Etsy for $1.6B, while The Real Real, Poshmark, and ThredUp are among a recent flurry of public filings and IPOs in the resale space.
Gen Z’s preoccupation with sustainability and ethical production has also been a major driver of the trend, with many members of the younger generation preferring to forego the products of fast fashion as they build their wardrobes. A new slate of secondhand clothing sellers has sprung up in response to meet the needs of a growing customer base. ThredUp’s 2021 Resale Report estimates that of the country’s 52M total secondhand clothing sellers, nearly 70% entered the market for the first time in 2020.
While most people who resell clothing only do so occasionally as a side-hustle, a growing contingent are morphing into “power sellers” who generate most or all of their income from curating and reselling high-quality clothing collections across the major secondhand marketplaces.
Enter Flyp, which enables these power sellers (an estimated population of 400K+ and growing) to streamline their operations and more effectively source items for their online storefronts.
Flyp has developed two core solutions aimed at facilitating the resale process. The first is their AI-driven platform (the first and only of its kind) which enables consumers and businesses to offload their used items to power sellers, who can then sell those items on behalf of the original owner via marketplaces like eBay and Poshmark. The second is a suite of eCommerce automation tools that allows power sellers to significantly reduce the amount of time they spend on inventory management and cross-channel sales operations. Both solutions have been a huge hit since the company’s launch in 2019. The number of items resold with Flyp increased by 400% in 2021. The number of resellers using the tool also doubled by the end of Q1 in 2022; the platform now boasts over 17,000 power sellers as members. $1M of goods are resold every month on Flyp, contributing to 160 metric tons of textile saved from landfills around the world.
We’re proud to count Afore Capital among the company’s seed investors, and are excited to share that the company recently closed a $10M Series A led by Asymmetric Capital Partners where we will be doubling down on our commitment! Huge congratulations to the whole team.
