Grailed is an internet-based marketplace that focuses on men’s fashion, allowing individuals to purchase and sell a broad selection of clothing, sneakers, and accessories, encompassing both premium designer products and streetwear. If you’d like to start your own marketplace like Grailed, 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 a marketplace SaaS. Go live, start selling, iterate.
Build vs Buy a marketplace?
Leveraging open-source can be advantageous, offering complete control and the freedom to customize. However, these advantages often entail significant expenses. The creation of a full-scale marketplace solution is a prolonged and costly process, typically lasting several months to years. This insight is drawn from various marketplace project experiences.
Unless you have access to substantial funding, it’s usually more prudent to go with a ready-made, all-encompassing marketplace solution like Vendo, as recommended by someone with a long history of billing for marketplace development.
Back to the Grailed marketplace case study
Grailed is a big online shop for fancy men’s clothes that people buy and sell again. It started in 2013 in New York City by Arun Gupta and Jake Metzger. Grailed has grown a lot and got lots of money from investors. They got $60 million from a special kind of money round called Series B, and GOAT Group, another shop that sells used sneakers, gave them the most money. Some other important people also gave them money. This shows that many people are interested in buying and selling used clothes.
Grailed has grown a lot since they got $15 million in 2018. Now they have more than seven million people using their website all around the world. This is because many young people like to buy and sell used clothes.
Grailed is doing things differently and has smart partnerships. They work together with GOAT Group to make their website better. This helps them check if the clothes are real and good quality, which is really important in the fancy used clothes market.
As of 2022, Grailed has more than 10 million people using their website, and they have almost 5 million clothes for sale. This shows that many people like their website. In the beginning, they only sold fancy men’s clothes, but now they also sell women’s clothes, although they still mostly focus on men’s fashion.
Grailed makes about $9 million in money, and they have around 115 people working for them. They got $80 million in total from investors. This shows that they are doing well and growing.
How to emulate Grailed marketplace success?
If you’re looking to replicate a Grailed success, you might want to get your marketplace going sooner, in weeks rather than months. Check how your product lineup matches your audience’s interests and continually refine how you draw in customers based on real-world evidence.
Initially, test the market before investing heavily in 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?
