Mytheresa, a luxury fashion retailer, provides an extensive selection of designer apparel, footwear, purses, and accessories catering to women, men, and children. If you’d like to start your own marketplace like Mytheresa, 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?
Open-source has its share of advantages, like total ownership and the freedom to customize. Yet, these perks often involve considerable costs. Developing a complete marketplace solution is a time-consuming and expensive task, usually taking months or years, as we have learned from multiple marketplace projects.
If your funding isn’t huge, it’s more practical to use a pre-built, all-in-one marketplace solution like Vendo, advice from a person who has extensive experience in billing for marketplace development work.
Back to the Mytheresa marketplace case study
Mytheresa, a luxury multi-brand digital platform, has demonstrated remarkable financial performance in Fiscal Year 2023. The company achieved a record Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) of €855.8 million, representing a 14.5% growth from the previous fiscal year. This growth is noteworthy, especially in a challenging market environment, and is marked by a significant outperformance in the U.S. market, with a 40.8% GMV increase.
Mytheresa’s focus on catering to top customers, who are major spenders, has been a key growth driver, with these customers contributing 39% to the total GMV, a 30% increase from the previous year.
For the fourth quarter of Fiscal Year 2023, Mytheresa saw a GMV growth of 13% to €222.2 million and a net sales increase of 16.5% to €203.8 million. The company maintained a gross profit margin of 49% and consistent profitability, with an Adjusted EBITDA of €7.4 million. Over the full fiscal year, the company achieved an Adjusted EBITDA of €41.1 million, with an Adjusted EBITDA margin of 5.3%.
Mytheresa’s success extends beyond financial metrics. It has engaged customers with unique experiences, such as exclusive events in partnership with top fashion brands like Dolce & Gabbana.
The brand also expanded its offerings with the launch of exclusive collections, pre-launches, and certified pre-owned watches. A significant operational milestone was the opening of its first physical pop-up store in East Hampton, USA, and the commencement of operations in a new distribution center at Leipzig airport, signaling a commitment to enhanced customer service.
How to emulate Mytheresa marketplace success?
In pursuit of success like Mytheresa, contemplate setting up your marketplace promptly, in a few weeks rather than waiting months. It’s vital to test how well your product catalog meets your audience’s needs and revise your customer acquisition tactics according to real results.
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?
