Resale marketplace Treet —an eco-conscious wordplay on “tree” and “treat”—has launched over 150 retail programs in the past three years, with over 20 of its brand partners partaking in some form of an Earth Day initiative.
“Most of them are running promotions during Earth Day, Earth month or Earth week, as either discounts or incentives for their customers to get more credit for listing items or even just highlighting their recent programming,” Jake Disraeli, Treet’s co-founder and CEO, told Sourcing Journal. “Over the last couple of years, we felt this sort of drive from a lot of our brands so we built an event scheduler—like a promotion scheduler in our app—so that brands can easily schedule these sorts of events within their resale program.”
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The tool not only “unlocks” short-term discounts but also automates marketing that alerts consumers of said promotions.
Ettitude and Joyfolie, for example, are selling returned or second-quality inventory in a flash sale. Coclico and Kirrin Finch are increasing store credit to incentivize sellers to list items. Ministry of Supply and Portland Leather Goods are highlighting their resale programs throughout the week.
“Earth Day represents an incredible opportunity for brands with resale programs to showcase what they’re doing to be more sustainable while presenting a unique opportunity to offload second-quality units in a brand-right way,” Disraeli said.
The resale platform provides a turnkey service for brands looking to set up their own resale sites. It uses “stackable solutions” to help brands craft custom programs that fit their unique needs. Brands can enable just one or all four resale models to capture their entire available resale market.
“Something that’s really unique about Treet is you can launch one of those programs to three or four, and you can just toggle them on and off,” Disraeli said. From a brand perspective, a lot of brands might start with a peer-to-peer (P2P) program, the most popular resale model. Customers buy and sell from each other in exchange for cash or brand credit. This model gives sellers the highest value for their items sold. “Peer-to-peer is really great for value seekers; people who care the most about value like to get the most money out of the item that they’re selling, right? But that doesn’t capture the whole pie.”
So, the resale platform offers more options.
Through the off-price and returns model, Treet gives brands a dedicated “Brand Direct” path to sell off-price items, returned inventory and samples directly on their resale site. Trade-in allows customers to send items back to a brand—or Treet’s network of fulfillment partners—to be listed for resale. The last model offered is a combination of trade-in and P2P.
“Brands use Treet as an all-in-one sort of initiative to showcase more sustainable shopping and resale as well as unlock room in their warehouse,” Disraeli said. “We’re the only platform that exists today where you can stack all those very similar models on top of each other to build the perfect program for brands that they’re looking for.”
Last month, the startup raised $10 million in Series A funding, led by Two Sigma Ventures with participation from lead investors in previous rounds, First Round Capital, Bling Capital and Techstars.
“We’re witnessing a monumental shift in the way people shop as the secondhand market continues to accelerate,” Dan Abelon, partner at Two Sigma Ventures, said. “With Treet’s approach to making launching resale programs a breeze, they’re positioned to help the greatest number of brands meet the demands of their customers.”
That funding will further build out the company’s marketing automation engine, which currently drives about 30 percent of all sales across its retail sites. “We want to see that go up,” Disraeli said.
“There’s a big push in initiative internally to help brands make sure that Treet actually drives a lot of the promotions on behalf of our brands because we know that brands have a lot going on in their lives,” he continued. “We’re investing in more people and for our product team to actually build those features.”
Additionally, Treet has expanded internationally and just launched in the UK, with plans to bring the platform to the EU later this year.
“Our brands are really the DTC darlings; a lot of them have these insanely good buy-sell-trade Facebook groups already,” Disraeli said, noting that Treet helps those brands transfer their Discord or Facebook groups onto the resale program. “What’s really cool about is that because we work with these really savvy brands, they move really quickly, and they will be really smart about capturing the resale audience.”
So smart that some have seen resale become a bigger and bigger percentage of their revenue—by leveraging resale strategically to grow their business versus it just being a stab at sustainability.
“We’re really obsessed with making resale profitable for brands and not just another link on their website that they get to talk about during Earth month,” Disraeli said. “Obviously it’s really nice for them to have something to talk about—that’s pretty valuable. But it’s another thing if they get to do that and it provides real value.”
