If you're reading this and you don't know about Grailed.com, then it may be too late for you. The online secondhand designer clothing marketplace provides users with a space to buy and sell everything from Supreme hoodies to Rolexes at bargain prices on an easy to navigate site. Founder Arun Gupta was only 26 when we interviewed him back in January about how he coded the site himself, the kinds of product that people tend to look for secondhand, and about getting banned from popular Style forums for his work with Grailed. Gupta recently spoke with Fast Company about the future of his site and about the one grail item that kicked things off.
"It was mostly a fun side project," said the young founder of the start-up. "I wanted people to use it, and I wanted to be able to buy stuff. I just basically wanted to get the stuff for cheaper." Gupta wanted a pair of visvim FBT Bearfoots that retail for close to $700, but couldn't afford them.
Eventually he landed on the idea of creating his own designer marketplace and built it from scratch. Now Grailed sees around 10,000 new products listed a day, and as he told us in that interview, some people have made between $10,000 and $20,000 worth of used pieces through the site. "The sell-through rate is so quick," said Gupta. "Seventy percent of stuff sells in the first two weeks."
As for the future of Grailed.com, Gupta would not talk about his plans to make the site profitable, but he and his one employee are "focused on trying to scale." He still browses the site to find dope pieces, but so far he is not getting a cut of all the money that flows through his site and its users' Paypal accounts.
