Retail, new platforms, and luxury analyst. We're really thrilled to have James Reinhart here, the co-founder and CEO of ThredUp. Who here has shopped at ThredUp? Raise your hand. What was your experience like? [audio distortion] What's your favorite part of ThredUp? [audio distortion] Katie, what did you like about ThredUp? [audio distortion] Selection. What did you like about ThredUp? Selection. What did you like about ThredUp? [audio distortion] Value. Way in the back. What was your thought? [audio distortion] It’s a circular situation. Thanks, Sam. With amongst circular friends here. Yes. It is great to be here. ThredUp is transforming the resale sector with a mission to leverage technology, delivering the world's largest resale platform for apparel, shoes, and accessories. James, you founded it in 2009. I've known you for a very long time as well. The company has processed over 200 unique second-hand items. Most recently, at first quarter, you were ahead of expectations. Congrats. Revenue of $71 million and gross margins of 79%, and EBITDA at a 5% margin. The stock's up over 400% year to date as well. Nice job. Thanks. Also, vote for us in Excel II, please, if you value our research and are enjoying this. You need to get me a patch. We can do a collab. I'll try to resell this. James, so it's very interesting always to talk to you about your inspiration. Tell us a little bit about the founding story. The whole notion of competition has really transformed in the past. Yeah. Since the past few years. What's been the differences now between you and the other businesses? Yeah. I mean, the original founding story was, if you think back to 2009, you've been doing this a long time, there were these very transformative consumer experiences that were Airbnb, Uber, SpotUp. Everybody was sort of changing the way Bonobos was selling direct to consumer. Warby Parker was about to be founded. You had all these different ways that consumers were engaging. The mobile phone, the first iPhone is only a couple of years old. We just thought at that time that there would be this change in the way second-hand happened, and that before then, you were shopping on eBay, or you were shopping on Craigslist, or you were going to a thrift store. We thought there were such disruptive changes in technology, there would be some change to the way second-hand was done. Our core thesis was the changing nature of the seller. I think one of the things we learned is that there were lots of people. The true founding story for me is I went to sell my clothes at a local consignment store, and they would not take them. They said, "Oh, we just do luxury." I said, "Yeah, I have some of that, but the vast majority of the stuff I have is not luxury." I remember it was like a J. Crew cashmere sweater. I am like, "Yeah, we do not take that." I thought, "It cannot be worth zero." It may not be worth what they want to put it on the floor at, but it cannot be worth zero. That began this inspiration about the fact that we had this vast supply of stuff out there that was fundamentally mispriced. In my closet, it was worth zero, but to some other medium-sized male looking for a navy blue cashmere sweater, it would be worth $25. I'm looking for one. Cashmere is always right. That $25 gap, I was like, "There's value being destroyed in the world. Yeah. Supply versus demand. That began this very decade-plus long journey trying to reinvent the second-hand market. We have seen lots of competition along the way. We can talk about the early years or what is happening now, but we are still kind of trying to change the way people shop. What is happening now? What has happened to the nature of competition? Also, the big question mark for the models became profitability. Yeah. I think you had a lot of issues where capital was cheap, 2018, 2019, 2020 investors. There was just a panel of investors talking about growth and profits. I think businesses in the resale industry really began chasing growth at all costs. I mean, when we went public in 2021, the business was growing close to 50% and losing money. I think as the market shifted into 2022, you lived that, I lived that, the models became more disciplined. I think what's nice to see now is ThredUp is now our seventh quarter, seventh straight quarter of being EBITDA positive. We were cash generative last quarter, free cash flow for a number of quarters. We've guided to free cash flow. I think, and similar with The RealReal, I think The RealReal has done a good job projecting free cash flow. I think when Poshmark was taken private a couple of years ago, they were projecting to be free cash flow positive. I think there's a lot of good stuff that's happened in the industry. I think when we talk to investors these days, at conferences like this, it's more just getting them back acquainted with the stories. What was the recipe for achieving that tipping point? Did it work how you had thought it might work when you went public? Yeah. I mean, we talked a lot about returns to scale. I do think there is something to be said to just the raw dollars in the model. We have certainly seen as we have hit this $250-$300 million mark that you can start to generate real leverage in the model. I think what is nice for us as we think about going forward is you have hit this inflection point, and we are a marketplace. Even though this is a retail conference, we are a marketplace. The benefits of being a marketplace mean there are real returns to scale and leverage in SG&A, in process technology. I think we see some really nice positive leverage going forward. What about marketing as a percentage of sales? And first quarter was 18%. Is that a leverage point? And how do you make sure you optimize for a non-leaky bucket when you think about customer lifetime value? Yeah. I mean, we've been very focused on re-accelerating growth. What we've seen, we just had earnings in March, sorry, in May, and we printed our best Q1, was our best customer acquisition quarter ever. New customers year- over- year grew 95%. What I would tell you all, in some of the callbacks, we're actually seeing the cohorts be as good or better than we've seen in previous cohorts. Why is that? That's great. It's a combination of the product experience being better. Conversion rates are up, basket size, frequency of orders, all these things have improved. We'll get to talking about AI, but a lot of that has been the driver of this. Q1 was the best new customer acquisition quarter, then April was the best month from a new buyer acquisition we've ever had. You're starting to see this flywheel start to accelerate that I think is really positive. Who is your competition? Should you merge with TJ Maxx? When we survey customers and we ask them, "Hey, this item you purchased on ThredUp, if ThredUp didn't exist, where would you have purchased it?" A lot of them say off price. A lot of them do say TJ Maxx by name. There are no mergers in the works. Got it. OK. Got it. OK. Would not be a merger of equals, let's be clear. Yeah. What about digital meets physical regarding what you want? You've had a lot of amazing partnerships. You've been really forward-thinking and collaborative. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we really invented what has become the RAS industry, resale as a service. So we started back in 2018. We did a big collaboration with Reformation. We've done stuff with Madewell, J. Crew, Athleta, Kate Spade, Tommy. And so all those sorts of things I think have been building brand awareness and credibility for the business. If you go back to when we started the business, I mean, people were not talking about second-hand being cool. 2009, 2010, there was still a lot of stigma attached to it. I think while we have benefited, I think, from the zeitgeist of second-hand, I think we've also been a driver of turning second-hand, making it cool. We've done collabs with all sorts of celebrities, just trying to—Emma Watson was one a few years ago. It was great to really share the story. Yeah. The best practice is to not actually buy something new. Yes. Yeah. I think platforms like ThredUp or The RealReal or Posh or a number of these, the product experience had become so good, the value, I think the audience talked about the prices, means that our vision was always that you may not buy everything at ThredUp, but that you would at least give us a chance and take a look. We are starting to see consumers do that at higher volumes. The conversion rates are encouraging. I mean, what's made for happier customers lately in terms of innovating, less friction, et cetera? Yeah. The discoverability. Search is a very hard problem to solve in second-hand because you've got just millions and millions of SKUs. When a customer is typing their random query of things, getting accuracy is challenging. The biggest change is about 18 months ago, we started to really lean into an AI search-based product. Built on an OpenAI backend with an open-source company called FashionClip. It was trained on Farfetch data, actually. It just made discoverability of products better. We saw an immediate jump in conversion. That has formed this base layer for everything from image search. You can now take a photo of anything, whether it's in a magazine, or it's on the high street, or it's your friend. We will use that image search to find similar products. Can you give us an example of what happens with FashionClip versus prior? Yeah. I mean, it used to be that in our distribution center, when we would get this coat in, we could tag a few attributes about it. Now when you run it through FashionClip or what has evolved beyond that, it might tag 100 attributes about that jacket. Therefore, it is able to feed into a personalization engine that says, "Oh, Oliver would probably prefer this assortment." What you are starting to get is just better metadata about these items. Your ability to then outfit, generate style preferences, generate complementary pieces, like this jacket with this shirt with this tie, things that you could never have done before. Was it instantly hyper-productive, like no-brainer? The data I would tell you is that we spent about seven years building the old search product on ThredUp. Team of engineers working on it all the time, about 90 days in this new AI world, and the product was better. Yeah. We ran it against it took about six months to fully deploy it because we were sort of testing which search product was better. Do you think there'll be another leapfrog? I mean, or that one is the most remarkable for the past five years? I think that's the most from a foundational technology because the search piece powers a lot of what we do. I do think, I mean, we just ran another experiment. I can't talk about it in too much detail, but basically, when you hit some assortment pages, some merchandise pages, we changed the sortation based on some other parameters that we understood about the user. Conversion rate was 19% better. Yeah. Right. So there's a lot still to come. Are you changing that sortation based on the browsing behavior of a customer? Browsing behavior, where they came from, their purchase history. Those are all things that retailers have been doing for some time. I think the precision with which you can do it now with new AI-based technologies is just vastly superior to where it was just a couple of years ago. If you had to bet on one consumer behavior shift that will define the next five years, what have you spotted? I would say that consumers will continue to be lazier than ever. Yeah. I think part of the clean-out kit thesis for sellers is we've got to make it as easy as possible. That is on the seller side. On the buyer side, I just think people are lazy, so you need to serve up to them highly relevant information. Are they more lazy, or is it just older people saying that about younger people? Both. I mean, think about the explosion of delivery at home. Think about everything is in an on-demand world, which I think speaks of it's not just about convenience. It's like, shit, I don't want to cook. Let's just order DoorDash again. Yeah. Some versions of do-it-yourself and trading up and trading it down. What about the tariff topic, which is everyone's favorite? Yeah. I've heard of it. How are you planning your business and the minimus? Also, you've been really at the forefront of a lot of discussion and original research around this. Yeah. I mean, I think it's two parts. One, on the tariffs, if you know what's going to happen with all the tariffs, you should let us know. Right now, I think we expect that if the tariffs currently stay in place, costs will go up for a lot of retailers. Some retailers will be able to pass those on. Some won't. I think in that world, ThredUp will be even better value than it is today. My sense is that we could benefit from increasing prices for new apparel. On the de minimis side, it's something that from a policy perspective, we've advocated for multiple years, that this exemption of being able to kind of have goods sort of slip through without paying taxes, we thought was unfair. We've advocated for closing that loophole. That has happened in this administration. We think that that is good. I think it should be good for our business. Yeah. I I will say, though, just to be clear, our Q1 results and our Q2 guide, none of this stuff impacted Q1 because they were announced on April 2, going in place in May 2. April is not part of our Q1. All the momentum we were seeing in the business, I think, was separate from what we think is playing on what could play out over the rest of the year. What's your thought on the growth rate of the second-hand market and the CAGR, the forecasted CAGR, and also your own? Yeah. I mean, I think the market will continue to grow. The reason I have a lot of faith in it being strong double-digit growth is if you interview and profile successive generations of young people, increasingly second-hand is just part of their natural consumption curve. I think for guys that are like us, we came to second-hand and had to be taught and marketed to and explained. I think if you're 14 or 15, it's just in your zeitgeist. Second-hand is what you do. My guess is that the next generation will have an even higher penetration rate. I don't think this is a fad. I think this is something that's like a structural change in how people are going to want to shop. I think retailers increasingly will have to pay attention to that. Yeah. I mean, this is my ninth year of the conference. And I've featured all of our friends in the business, from you to The RealReal to Rebag to Fashionphile to Poshmark. What do you think might happen regarding consolidation or not, and how the evolution may happen? Yeah. I mean, I think our experience of the revenue run rate that we're at, the scale that we're at, I think you need to be in the hundreds and hundreds of millions to make the business generate real profits over time so that you can reinvest. I think businesses that have been operating subscale, I think, are going to be challenged. I can only say that because I have lived it. When we were subscale, it's just very hard to make all the math work. You've just mentioned a few of them, but there are others that are apps or different plays on the resale market that I think will be challenging to kind of break out. Should there be do you see a future in decentralization with peer-to-peer? Did you say decentralization? Yeah. Decentralization is probably a structural societal trend. Related to that is peer-to-peer versus a managed marketplace. Yeah. I mean. I mean, what do you think will happen? I think what you're seeing happen is Vinted in Europe has really thrown the gauntlet down around zero fees to sellers. That forced the hand of Depop in England to take fees to zero. Depop has done that. Depop's owned by Etsy. They've taken fees down in the U.S. I will tell you that my thesis from the very beginning is that peer-to-peer markets converge on zero take rates because it's effectively a race to the bottom to drive sellers into the platform. That has played out. What remains to be seen is that if you're a peer-to-peer market, how does the monetization work in a world where it's a fight for sellers? I wouldn't be surprised to see further consolidation in peer-to-peer. Why is your hypothesis peer-to-peer would go to zero? I just think if you're a rational actor and you're like, OK, I can get 100 units of great supply by charging sellers 20% take rate. Then somebody comes in and says, because remember, everybody in the peer-to-peer market is profit motivated first. They are like, oh, I have to give 20% to Oliver's platform. I, James's platform, I say, look, we could do the same thing, but we could only charge you 18%. The seller's like, great. I'm going to go sell with James. You're like, screw you. This plays out over a decade. Where do we get to? We get to zero. What Vinted figured out, and I give them an enormous amount of credit, is they could take seller fees to zero, and then they could monetize shipping, logistics, insurance, psychographic stuff around buyer returns. Rethinking the model. Rethinking the model. They sort of change where competition. Sources. Yeah, exactly. And so. What did that mean for you? What was your hypothesis for ThredUp? Our hypothesis was that, back to my five-year bet on the future, was that people are lazy, that they currently do not monetize the stuff in their closet, and that it is a big pain in the butt. If we could offer them a seller experience where we send you the bag, you fill it, we pick it up at your house, people are like, that sounds great. When we went public, we estimated there was a billion, with a B, a billion clean-out kits available in the U.S. every year. That is how much stuff was accumulating. Our thesis was that if we could build the best mousetrap to get all that supply, eventually, we could figure out the unit economics, automation in our distribution centers, to sell it to buyers. The thing that I got wrong was, or that I thought would happen sooner, is I thought a lot of the technology we could build to build a better buyer experience, better search product, better merchandising, all that stuff, just proved to be very challenging until AI. All of a sudden, AI was like a 10x improvement in the ability to build a great buying experience. Yeah. The reducing friction, improving discovery, transforming the path to purchase. And for you. In 90 days. Yeah, in 90 days. Instead of seven years. Instead of seven years. I think more that because if you all sort of look at your clothing, I can give you time. You can go find the barcode on your clothing. We can wait. There isn't any barcode on your clothing. The reality is when we get into. Is that a trick question? Yeah. The idea is that you don't have any structured data. You actually have to build all of this data and figure out how to merchandise all this stuff. The thing I think is really important is that I think the AI technology, while it benefits traditional retailers in some ways, I think it disproportionately benefits long-tail marketplaces like ThredUp. I think it'll disproportionately benefit Etsy. I think it'll disproportionately benefit eBay. I think it'll disproportionately benefit ThredUp. It will have those implications for all marketplaces then. I think all marketplaces are going to be better off. Yeah. You have a deep knowledge of philosophy, too. What are your thoughts of AI and ethics and privacy? I think it's going to destroy way more jobs than the average person thinks. I think we should be fully aware of how it's with three youngest children, infecting their brains in both positive and negative ways. I'm sort of an AI, I'm bullish on AI's ability to solve some of humanity's hardest problems. I think it will be massive destruction in the labor market. It's a force for both chains. Yeah. It will be when I think about how do you educate kids in a world like that, I think you have to. The fact that my kid's school doesn't let them use ChatGPT for stuff, I think is OK. I think it misses actually the boat and the power of how technology can be harnessed for good. How have you changed as a leader over the years? I think that the public markets have beaten the pure unbridled optimism out of me. Really? Yeah. I've become more of a realist in my old age. No, I think I have a healthier balance around vision and storytelling and delivering the numbers. I mean, you were always good at storytelling. You got better at it? No, I think I got beaten down by the numbers. Yeah. No. No, I think I've matured. I think I have just a much healthier balance of what I've always been a what could go right guy. I think now I also have a healthier skepticism of you have to manage risk. You have to be thoughtful about the downside and resource allocation, things that I probably did not spend enough time on. What about, are stock analysts awful? What should they do? What should they do? What's your feedback for the generalized version of Oliver Chen? You mean other stock analysts? Yeah. Yeah, other people. Other people. I think generally, the analysts that are the best ones, they ask really good questions. I think they have a healthy balance of understanding for investors what can go right and what can go wrong. To me, when I read the best reports that come out of you guys and others, it is, hey, this is sort of the basic, this is the basic case. Here is what you should think about if you are in the bull case. Here is the bear case. Let people make up their own minds. I think the more you can put people in a bull-bear scenario, I think it just helps people ask themselves good questions. Frame them with opportunity and possibilities. Yeah. What do you think is most underappreciated about ThredUp? I think people still don't appreciate two things. One, that we're a marketplace. I just. That's not very hard to understand, but we're a marketplace. I know. I think we get tracked in some ways because we sell apparel, that we look more like a retailer. I think this whole tariff conversation was a good, I think, lightning rod to say, oh, you know one of the companies that's not exposed to this is ThredUp. Marketplaces are hard, too, though. They're hard. Yeah, they're hard. I think people don't, I think, give us enough appreciation for the competitive advantages that we've built in the marketplace. Oh, the scale. That scale. The hard part of the job. Yeah. And then the other is I've been talking about the full investment in AI for 18 months and how the product experience on ThredUp, search that we've only talked about, but the concentric circles out of that. Back to the marketplace comment, I think people sort of bucket us like, oh, yeah, it's like another consumer company talking about AI. If you really look at the practical application of who wins and who loses from better AI technology, ThredUp is a company that, on average, should be better off because of the nature of the product. I think we get grouped unfairly sometimes as a retailer that uses computers versus a marketplace with cutting-edge AI technology. We're asking all CEOs this. How would you rate the health of your consumer on a scale of 1 to 10? I think snapshot in time right now, it's probably a 7 or an 8, probably an 8. I think I am cautiously optimistic that the consumer is going to hold up better than I might have thought 30 or 45 days ago. I am just not seeing right now a lot of fear and uncertainty doubt. If you had to bet on one consumer behavior shift that will define the next five years, what have you spotted? I mean, the stuff that's coming out of the Sam Altman, Jony Ive acquisition of I/O, setting aside the cringe nature of how it all came together and how it was done, it could be quite revolutionary if we are wearing devices. I have the Meta glasses. Did you get them? Yeah, I have the Meta glasses. I actually just got them. I think they're super cool. I think if you, for example, had something tucked right here that was just tracking everything. Oh, you kind of do. What do you got? Limitless. So it's. How many people have heard of Limitless? That's a little weird. Yeah. I think that's like a startup. It's uncharted. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just thinking about emerging device technology. It's a powerful thing that I think we're only beginning to understand. If we go back to 2007 and think, and you asked us that question, and somebody was like, the iPhone, right? Imagine the iPhone five years after the iPhone in 2012 and what it did. I think this technology that Jony Ive and Sam Altman are cooking up could be transformative. It could also be a total disaster. We're also asking what are you reading, a book that you love, or watching a show or a movie that you love? The book that I'm reading, I have a random assortment of stuff. I'm rereading "The Brothers Karamazov," which is a book I read in college by Dostoyevsky. I am reading this book called "The Wager," which is about this shipwreck. The boat is called "The Wager." It's terrific. I would really recommend Arthur Brooks if you want to get happier in life. Yeah, he does a great job. Arthur Brooks is the best. He will make you infinitely happy. He's building the financial model for happiness. Building the financial model for happiness. Or building the. Infrastructure. The city model in your head for happiness. Last question, but what are the hardest problems or hardest challenges or most exciting challenges you're facing? I think right now is we bought a business in Europe that was very challenging. We sold that business last year. I underestimated how taxing that was from a distraction on the team and myself. The ability, really, since the end of last year to fully reorient on the US business has been incredible. It was a business that I knew at the back of my hand up until we went public. The ability now, I think the most fun I'm having is seeing all the ways the product can get better for customers and the way we can use technology to make it better. That's super fun. That's back to founder building and exciting stuff. James, it's been amazing to know you throughout and also hear about the latest and greatest and also how many things are impacting the business. A lot of the core tenets remain the same of the market. Yep. Thank you for your time. We appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks, Oliver. Appreciate it. Appreciate it.