French luxury resale platform Vestiaire Collective became the first second-hand fashion firm in the world to become B Corp Certified in September 2021. B Corp is a designation that evaluates a company’s social and environmental performance, transparency and accountability – a process that involves over 300 questions about every aspect of a business, from a team’s working conditions to carbon footprints.
At the time, the company’s co-founder and president, Fanny Moizant, said: “It’s a huge step on our way t0 transforming the fashion industry. Vestiaire Collective was born with the idea that we can drive change for
a more sustainable future.”
Noting that it received particular praise for its standards in ‘workers’ and ‘governance’ areas, the company said that its B Corp status demonstrates that it cares as much for the planet as it does for its own people and profit.
The reseller is now challenging other marketplaces, as well as fashion brands and industry players, to work towards getting their B Corp Certification. Its brand slogan is “Long Live Fashion”, as a nod towards spearheading circular fashion. It curates and connects desirable wardrobes and provides a trusted and sustainable new way of buying and selling pre-loved items. It also acquired US resale marketplace Tradesy in March 2022 to continue its growth.
The platform is unique thanks to its highly engaged activist community and an inventory of 3m items. It has over 7.5m fashion savvy members in 50 countries worldwide. Every week, over 30,000 new items are submitted by its community of sellers, enabling buyers to access over 3,500 newly listed coveted and must-have fashion pieces every day. It may have had a slower start to 2022 in terms of monthly downloads, but is recovering quickly, pushing nearly one million monthly downloads in April.
Vestiaire Collective is just one of the fashion marketplaces examined in our sister publication RetailX’s Fashion Brands and Marketplaces 2022 report which you can download here.
