Social Shopping

How Poshmark transcended secondhand clothing to become a $625 million fashion marketplace, complete with its own homegrown entrepreneurs.

- Biz Carson

Manish Chandra, 51, dresses the part of a Silicon Valley engineer turned fashion app CEO, pairing his Louis Vuitton belt and Tommy Bahama dress shirt with Adidas NMD sneakers. They’re all items he purchased on Poshmark, the social shopping app he co-founded with Tracy Sun (now in charge of expanding into new markets), Gautam Golwala (CTO) and Chetan Pungaliya (engineering chief ). “My first job was working for Intel building databases for semiconductors, and today I help men and women sell shoes,” Chandra says. “Only in Silicon Valley can you have that journey over the course of 30 years.”

It’s an increasingly lucrative trip, largely because of Poshmark, in which Chandra holds an estimated 15% stake. Poshmark started seven years ago as a way for women to make money off-loading extra items from their closets—an eBay for used clothing. It’s now becoming more than that, selling new clothes too, complete with its own wholesale market and homegrown fashion entrepreneurs who are selling their own clothing lines. The company has carved out a niche that feels like window-shopping on a phone instead of the search-to-buy purchasing experience you get on Amazon. People follow each other’s virtual closets full of clothes for sale— often preworn items with a mix of boutique items bought wholesale— and share items they find interesting. It’s a social network of 40 million people that’s a combination of influencers and your friends, akin to Instagram or Pinterest. The difference is: Everything you see is for sale.