![]() ![]() “I immediately identified with the problem,” says Nakache, herself a mother of three. at Harvard, led the round from Trinity and joined ThredUp’s board. After raising a small friends-and-family round in early 2010, ThredUp raised its first venture funding in a $1.4mm round led by Trinity Ventures that July. This type of growth in such a key consumer sector attracted the attention of the VC community. Patricia Nakache, who led Trinity Ventures’ investment She is “dressed head to toe in ThredUp clothing,” the proud father reports. Reinhart’s baby girl, now 19 months old, has also been added as a happy customer. “We’re still adding between 500-1,000 parents a day to the platform.” ![]() Now we have 300,000 parents.” ThredUp has now helped parents trade almost 3 million pieces of clothing and is still growing rapidly. Says Reinhart: “When we were moving from adults to kids, we had 10-20,000 people, which is nothing. Since that first pivot, ThredUp has hit its stride. ThredUp’s kids’ clothes swapping business allows customers to select a box of clothes for their child and offer up a box of their own, with numerous community aspects and a premium membership available. “We launched the kids’ part in April 2010, and we’ve been off ever since.” ![]() “We realized there was a huge opportunity in kids because there’s the forced obsolescence of kids’ clothing,” says Reinhart, whose wife was pregnant at the time of ThredUp’s shift toward children. ThredUp found a natural market for their swapping focus with children. ![]() “The target from the beginning should have been parents trading their kids’ clothes, rather than trading their own clothes.” “We very quickly realized that the market wasn’t quite right,” says Homer. Rather than get too discouraged, Reinhart and Homer changed their focus. Men and women will somewhat wear used clothes, but it’s not mainstream enough to be a large Internet business.”Īn Opportunity with the Children’s Market Founders James Reinhart, Oliver Lubin, and Chris Homer How bad a business was it? “Customer adoption and use of the product wasn’t nearly what we had hoped,” says Reinhart.Įxplains Homer, an engineer who previously worked at Microsoft: “It was the wrong demographic. We had a really good launch, getting in the New York Times and on the Today show. “We launched the first product focused on men’s and women’s clothes in September of 2009. “We were focused on underutilized assets in adult clothing,” says Reinhart, who previously founded a renowned charter school in the Bay Area. CEO Reinhart and his undergraduate classmate from Boston College, Oliver Lublin, then pulled in Homer, his HBS Section D classmate, as CTO. He went on to earn a semi-finalist spot in that year’s HBS Business Plan Contest. In an article in The Harbus in March 2009, he described ThredUp as being focused on men’s dress shirts. The site was originally a peer-to-peer online clothes sharing site for adults. Reinhart, who also received his MPA from Harvard’s Kennedy School, launched the company midway through his 2 nd year. Few recent HBS entrepreneurs have pivoted better or more boldly than James Reinhart and Chris Homer (both MBA, 2009) with their venture-backed company ThredUp, the leading online children’s clothing exchange. All Silicon Valley entrepreneurs know about The Pivot, the shift a start-up makes when it changes course with its business. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |