Vestiaire wear

In less than a decade, Vestiaire Collective has become the go-to for online sales of secondhand fashion

There was a time when eBay was pretty much the only viable re-commerce platform around. But what if, in the years before 2009, you were a fashion lover who wanted to buy or sell top-quality designer clothing or accessories? Aside from eBay and its notorious unreliability for high-end goods, there was the inconvenience of buying from individual bloggers or (millennial shocker!) brick-and-mortar secondhand shops.

For Fanny Moizant, one of the six founders of online designer resale boutique Vestiaire Collective, it was that inconvenience of buying from bloggers that nudged her to start the online luxury consignment app, which currently has more than seven million users. "The light bulb moment for us was that the girls with fashion blogs couldn't maintain wearing new outfits every day and had to sell what they wore on their blogs," explains the French tech entrepreneur, who moved from Paris to London in 2013, then to Hong Kong last year. "I was personally interested in buying, but the correspondence and payment was very inconvenient.

I had to send an email, then a cheque or money transfer ... It was a pain. So I decided to bring fashion people onto one platform based on trust, with a smooth trading process."

Moizant wanted the opposite of a timed bidding system like eBay's. The app has a suggested selling price, but the final price is determined by the community after discussions (aka bargaining) between buyers and sellers. Bidding is market-driven, where people can strike a deal as soon as both parties agree on a price. The app makes buying and selling easy - members don't have to keep checking back like auctions or eBay. To emphasize how fast buyers react to desirable stock, Moizant firmly says, "A good product with a good price goes without bidding." Vestiaire Collective collects anywhere from 25 percent to 40 percent commission on sales.