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Good news for Tracy Dinunzio: her P2P clothing site Tradesy just closed a $13 million round from Kleiner Perkins and Richard Branson. This financial support is a far cry from the days of founding Tradesy: in 2012, Dinunzio launched Tradesy by putting her apartment’s guest room on Airbnb, selling her car and borrowing $5,000 from her parents three times. Then, without a technical background, she set out to build the platform herself.
“I scraped it together as I went,” Dinunzio said in January. “And took it one day at a time. You have to do it in bite-sized portions.”
Today, Dinunzio has turned Tradesy from an idea into a site taking advantage of the huge opportunity in women’s fashion: “The velocity of the fashion category has increased so much over the last 10 years. Today 35 percent more is spent than 10 years ago.”
Tradesy has an inventory worth over $1 billion and over 1 million users who have bought or sold an item. What attracts them? Clothing purchases on Tradesy can be up to 90 percent off retail - plus Tradesy only takes 9 percent of the sale price from sellers.
Now, with a fresh $13 million in her pocket, Dinunzio will bring even more savings to more users by eventually expanding Tradesy to be a platform for items besides women's clothing.
“We’re focused on women’s fashion as the initial priority,” Kleiner Perkins general partner John Doerr said in a Recode interview. “But it’s very clear that it’s a bigger idea than that.”
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