Curated Crowd marketplace case study: book a demo to start yours
Curated Crowd is an online platform that empowers up-and-coming fashion designers by offering a marketplace for their original and inventive designs, enabling consumers to explore and buy exclusive fashion items directly from the designers.
If you’d like to start your own marketplace like Curated Crowd, you’re facing a buy vs build decision. So before you decide to build it in-house on top of Spree open-source, consider using Vendo, which is the feature-rich Enterprise Edition cutting your time-to-market to a few weeks.
Build vs Buy a marketplace?
The use of open-source brings several advantages, such as total ownership and the ability to adapt as needed, but these benefits have their own costs. Developing a comprehensive marketplace solution is a lengthy, expensive endeavor, usually taking several months to years, as learned from various marketplace projects.
If you haven’t raised a significant amount of money, you’re much better off choosing a complete, off-the-shelf marketplace solution like Vendo, as advised by someone who has extensive experience in billing clients for marketplace development.
Back to the Curated Crowd marketplace case study
Curated Crowd, an online marketplace, has emerged as a unique fusion of style and innovation, focusing on connecting fashion enthusiasts with emerging designers from around the globe.
Founded by Ada Chen, a former corporate professional, Curated Crowd was born out of the realization of the challenges young designers face in breaking into the fashion industry. The platform started as a modest venture but quickly evolved into a significant player in the fashion marketplace, attracting designers from various parts of the world.
The success of Curated Crowd lies in its strategic approach. The platform is selective in curating its designers, ensuring that only the finest talents are showcased. This attention to quality, combined with a user-friendly technology interface, simplifies the shopping experience, making it easy for customers to browse and purchase unique designs.
Additionally, the platform’s marketing acumen has played a crucial role in highlighting the work of these emerging designers, allowing them to shine in a competitive market. One of Curated Crowd’s defining features is its commitment to disrupting the traditional fashion cycle. By sidestepping the fast fashion trend, the platform offers direct access to unique and creative independent labels.
Many of these labels produce in small quantities, offer limited edition collections, or operate on a made-to-order basis, providing something special and exclusive to fashion-conscious consumers. Furthermore, Curated Crowd extends its reach beyond the digital realm by hosting pop-up events in London, thereby offering both online convenience and tangible, in-person experiences.
Curated Crowd also actively supports the growth of its designers by offering services such as digital marketing, personal styling, content creation, and access to international manufacturers. This comprehensive support system demonstrates the platform’s dedication to nurturing talent, regardless of geographical boundaries.
How to emulate Curated Crowd marketplace success?
For a success like Curated Crowd’s, it’s recommended to initiate your marketplace quickly, in just a few weeks instead of months. Evaluate the suitability of your products for your audience and refine your customer acquisition strategies based on real-world insights.
Test the market before going all in on building it.
Here’s what you’d be getting with a Vendo free trial:
- Book a marketplace demo call: We’ll set up your demo marketplace and populate it with products, so you could give it a try and start selling in 14 days
- Customize your Storefront: Use the drag & drop page builder or custom CSS
- Onboard Brands: Invite your brands or choose brands from our catalog
- Select Products: Curate products and collections manually or automate it
- Embed products: Make your content, newsletters, social media shoppable
- Get Paid: Get paid as soon as products are shipped by the brands
- End-to-end automation: Brands sync, fulfillment, payouts, invoicing, taxes
When you’ve tried all that and it works, start thinking about building your own, custom-made marketplace project based on Spree Commerce. First, by decoupling the storefront and going headless with Vendo marketplace API, and later with your own backend, if you decide you really need it. Just lift and shift the storefront.
Nobody has to know what’s under the hood, right?
