Vestiaire Collective and the Vintage Renaissance

This is an excerpt from the 2021 E-Commerce Leaders’ Playbook. To read the full article, you can purchase a copy of the Playbook here. 

The exclusivity of luxury fashion is what keeps customers coming back for more. The desirable, influential and just-out-of-reach image that brands such as Hermès, Louis Vuitton and Chanel provide are what makes them so attractive to consumers worldwide. Enter Vestiaire Collective, the online retailer that makes those exclusive products a little bit more accessible to lovers of designer labels and fashion fanatics. 

Founded in 2009 in Paris by Alexandre Cognard, Sébastien Fabre, Henrique Fernandes, Sophie Hersan, Christian Jorge and Fanny Moizant, Vestiaire Collective offers authentic luxury bags, shoes and apparel at discounted prices. Operating as an online marketplace, users can sell and buy designer goods from around the world. 

Looking for a 2001 Christian Dior 1947 Montaigne bag? How about a pair of leather boots from Iris Van Herpen? Vestiaire Collective houses tens of thousands of vintage, pre-loved and rare designer goods to its nine million users. And with its platform expanding to 90 countries, it’s one of the largest online marketplaces of its kind. 

Vestiaire Collective houses thousands of second hand designer goods | via Vestiaire Collective

A Purse-Sized Gap in the Market

How did it all start? Fanny Moizant, one of the Co-Founders of the retailer, noticed that a lot of fashion-savvy influencers were selling their pieces from the season prior, in an effort to make some extra money during the 2009 recession. During this time, there were no online retailers that sold authenticated designer goods, especially at a reasonable price for the condition the item was in. 

“In 2009, I noticed that fashion girls were selling previous season products on their blogs during the recession, but I was concerned that there wasn’t a trusted online site that would guarantee authenticity and give a fair price for the piece depending on its condition,” says Fanny Moizant. “That gave me the idea to launch Vestiaire Collective; I teamed up with five other co-founders and we launched the site in a matter of months from our Paris apartments.” 

To read the full article, you can purchase a copy of the Playbook here. 

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