Rêve En Vert is a retailer specializing in sustainable luxury fashion, providing environmentally conscious and ethically produced clothing, accessories, and beauty items.
If you’d like to start your own marketplace like Rêve En Vert, 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?
Employing open-source has its benefits, such as full ownership and the freedom to adapt, but these come with their own costs. Developing a complete marketplace solution is an extensive and costly endeavor, often taking many months or years, as learned from multiple marketplace projects.
If you haven’t secured a significant amount of funding, it’s generally more sensible to adopt a pre-built, all-encompassing marketplace solution like Vendo, as recommended by an expert with years of experience in billing for marketplace development.
Back to the Rêve En Vert marketplace case study
In 2013, Cora Hilts and Natasha Tucker started Rêve En Vert, a pioneer in eco-friendly fashion. Cora’s interest in sustainability grew during her internship at Stella McCartney, while Natasha gained insights from studying sustainable food on an organic farm in Bermuda.
Rêve En Vert goes beyond just selling sustainable luxury; it combines high fashion, ethics, and sustainability, challenging the idea that luxury and eco-friendliness can’t coexist. They offer ethically made, environmentally friendly products without sacrificing luxury, earning the title “the Net-a-Porter of sustainable fashion.”
Despite facing challenges like higher prices due to sustainable production, Rêve En Vert remains committed to ethical and sustainable practices. They also educate consumers about sustainability through “Rev Talk,” an editorial forum on their website, promoting dialogues on environmental topics.
Rêve En Vert doesn’t limit its impact to the digital world; they organize offline events to raise awareness and discuss sustainability, aligning with their luxurious brand image. Looking ahead, their vision fits well with the global emphasis on sustainable fashion, as cities like Paris aim to become sustainable fashion capitals, and organizations like the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) commit to sustainability. Rêve En Vert is at the forefront of this movement.
How to emulate Rêve En Vert marketplace success?
To follow in the footsteps of Rêve En Vert’s success, think about quickly launching your marketplace, opting for weeks over months. Make sure your product catalog aligns with your audience’s preferences and continually adjust your methods for attracting customers, drawing on actual outcomes.
Test the market before making a full commitment to build 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?
