Urban Kissed is an eco-conscious fashion platform connecting shoppers with ethical brands, offering a thoughtfully curated range of sustainable clothing and accessories that prioritize both environmental and social values.
If you’d like to start your own marketplace like Urban Kissed, 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?
The benefits of using open-source are numerous, including complete control and the ability to customize freely. However, these perks come with significant expenses. Crafting a fully functional marketplace solution is a lengthy and costly process, often spanning months or even years. This is a lesson we’ve drawn from various marketplace projects.
Unless you’ve secured a hefty amount of funding, opting for a pre-built, comprehensive marketplace solution like Vendo is a wiser choice, as advised by someone who has extensive experience in billing clients for marketplace development.
Back to the Urban Kissed marketplace case study
Urban Kissed, a Switzerland-based online marketplace, has become a big player in the slow and ethical fashion world. They connect more than 100 eco-friendly brands with shoppers who care about sustainability. They offer a wide range of products, including clothes, bags, accessories, shoes, beauty items, underwear, jewelry, home goods, and men’s clothing, all focused on being eco-friendly.
The marketplace was started in 2017 by Sophie Brunner, who had a finance background and studied fashion in Milan and London. She saw how fast fashion was harming the environment and created Urban Kissed to offer trendy and affordable options that are also sustainable.
Urban Kissed is unique because they are open and build a community. They have a Slow & Ethical Index for customers to evaluate products’ eco-friendliness. They also support small eco-conscious businesses and have a network of over 100 trusted brands.
The marketplace has been praised by publications like the Financial Times and Forbes and is part of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation community, showing its influence and credibility in ethical fashion.
They had challenges with managing products and orders but solved them by using Webkul’s CS-Cart Shopify Connector addon, which automated tasks and saved time. They also experienced growth by using Stripe for payments, which improved the checkout experience, reduced fraud, and led to a 150% increase in business, serving customers from 65 countries.
How to emulate Urban Kissed marketplace success?
If you’re aspiring for success similar to Urban Kissed, plan to open your marketplace swiftly, preferably in weeks instead of months. Examine the compatibility of your product offerings with your audience’s demands, and adapt your customer acquisition techniques based on tangible outcomes.
It’s wise to gauge the market’s potential before fully investing in its development.
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?
