Fashion site Poshmark raises $25M so more women can have cleaner closets

Poshmark is today announcing it has raised $25 million so it can keep mining women’s closets.

The online marketplace has made a name for itself by offering a place where women can sell and buy each others’ unused clothing from their smartphones. The site also offers new merchandise for about 20 percent of its offerings.

(Men, one infers, regularly wear everything they own.)

The company attributes at least part of its appeal to giving its users the ability to curate their best items and create followers for their style. The company claims over 700,000 sellers, including top sellers it says are making north of six figures.

It is also announcing today a Poshmark app for the Apple Watch so that women can also clean out their closets from their wrists.

Founder/CEO Manish Chandra told me via email that Poshmark’s social + commerce model works so well that “traditional marketplaces will no longer exist as people begin to crave personal connections that have gotten lost in e-commerce.”

(For those of us who practice speed-shopping, where the goal is to spend the least amount of time in commerce, that’s not welcome news.)

The Menlo Park, California-based company says it is hitting a $200 million run rate in annual sales, thanks to users employing its app an average of nine times daily.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hOSx1uI6vs

Social commerce also powers eBay, handmade marketplace Etsy, and online consignment shop TheRealReal. But, Chandra said, Poshmark differs because it is equal parts commerce and community.

He noted that, in other community marketplaces like Etsy or Airbnb, “not everyone is a maker,” but fashion is nearly universal among women, and virtually every woman can be both buyer and seller on his site.

The new funding will be used to scale the business to work more closely with designers and brands, to develop new features, and to expand — into other countries, as well as into services beyond women’s fashion.

This round, which brings the total raised by the company to $47.2 million since its founding in early 2011, came from Mayfield, Menlo Ventures, Inventus Capital, Union Grove Venture Partners, Shea Ventures, and SoftTech VC. Celebrity investors have included actor Ashton Kutcher and fashion stylist Rachel Zoe.