Portfolio Company Spotlight
A feature on a Closed Loop Partners investment
The Rise of Resale: Digitizing Vintage
Closed Loop Ventures Group invested in Thrilling, an online marketplace of vintage and secondhand items from boutiques across the United States.
Every year, 100 billion items of clothing are produced for a planet of 7.5 billion humans, and fashion consumption continues to rise, while the average number of times a garment is worn in its lifetime decreases. Thrilling has disrupted the vintage clothing market, digitizing clothes from local vintage shops to create a seamless customer experience.
Market Opportunity
There are more than 40,000 secondhand apparel stores across the United States, but more than 95% of their inventory is offline. And the resale market is growing 21x faster than the retail apparel market in the past three years.18
The Circular Advantage
Value: Creates value for and empowers small business owners of individual vintage shops by digitizing their inventory and creating new sales channels
Scale: Helps vintage stores reach a broader, global customer base and connects shoppers to unique, high quality, secondhand inventory at scale
Solves for a critical cost in the reuse market––sortation: Textiles require labor-intensive inspection and categorization after use, and Thrilling uses existing small-scale vintage shops across the nation to categorize, upload and digitize inventory