Online Clothing Swap Facilitator Raises Expansion Capital

A fact of any parent’s life is that children quickly outgrow their clothes when the goods are still useful. Fortunately, there’s no need to wastefully throw out used clothing. This is the idea behind hand-downs discarded by growing older siblings. When the right size of younger family member doesn’t exist, a parent resorts to clothing swaps with other parents.

ThredUP has expanded the market for this process by operating an online children’s clothing exchange. The company recently raised $7,000,000 in a second round of funding.

Parents use the ThredUP website to browse different boxes based on clothing type, gender, brand, size, season, or other search criteria. As an exchange, users pay $5 plus shipping. The San Francisco company says that 1,000 parents join the site every day and that around one million items have been exchanged. ThredUP has also added sections for swapping toys, books, and media items.

The ThredUP website lists thousands of boxes full of used children’s items. A box is delivered for anyone who orders from the nationwide community of parents. The service eliminates the time-consuming task of organizing a clothing swap. Navigating the site is similar to eBay or Amazon.

It only takes users a few minutes to post their own boxes of clothes and toys for babies, toddlers, or pre-teens. ThredUP provides an easy way for parents to regularly discard outgrown items.

When items are listed, clothes are sorted for future buyers by size, gender, and season. Tops and bottoms are separated unless they are matching outfits. Upon registration at ThredUP, parents receive a free pack of USPS flat rate boxes. These are used to ship the items when another member selects the box. ThredUP schedules the pick up and pays for the postage because the fees of acquiring members cover the cost.

Initial funding for ThredUP was $1,700,000. The new infusion brings total capital raised to $8,700,000. Brian Swette, former CEO of eBay, invested in the new round along with Redpoint Ventures and Trinity Ventures.