Vestiaire Collective founder makes waves in pre-loved luxury

(Photo:plus size formal dresses)

Fanny Moizant is filled with ­delight at her first glimpse of the Icebergs ocean pool at Sydney’s Bondi Beach. It’s probably not far from the delight that her ­company Vestiaire Collective brings to its members when they stumble across that fashion gem.

“Oh my god,” she says, still reeling from the view. “I discovered this place on Instagram a few years ago. I come from the south of France, so it’s really ­important for me to be close to the water. I can’t wait to go and walk on the beach.”

That will be about all the downtime in Moizant’s stay in Sydney, which has kicked off ­celebrations for the Asia-Pacific launch of Vestiaire Collective, the luxury fashion resale website she launched with five others seven years ago.

Success of the site — which has six million members globally — has taken Moizant by surprise, even though she clearly thought she was onto something in ­creating a trusted platform from which to sell preloved luxury ­pieces.

“Honestly, back in the day I had just given birth to my two daughters and wanted to be an entrepreneur,” says Moizant. “And I thought ‘it’s going to be easy; I have my kids; I can work from home, manage my own diary’. In that first year that (idea) was completely blown up.”

Five years ago Moizant relocated from Paris to set up a London office; there are now others in New York, Milan, Berlin and soon Hong Kong, where Moizant will be based during a set-up ­period to impart the company DNA. The company now has about 250 staff globally.

The site’s formula is simple, but staggering. If you have an item to sell, you fill in a submission form on the website, outlining brand, condition, and your price, along with photos. Each day, about 4000 products are ­submitted for consideration.

These are then curated by a team, with about 30 per cent ­rejected. “Sometimes (this is ­because) it is simply not interesting as a product, because it’s out of date or the quality is not good.”

Of the submissions accepted, the supplied photographs are deep-etched then uploaded. At this stage everything remains in the digital realm.

On purchase, the seller is notified and sent a prepaid voucher to send the item to the office nearest to the seller’s location. Vestiaire Collective keeps on average a 25 per cent commission.

When the item arrives at the office, there’s a two-way check. First, for quality control, to ­ensure the item is as the seller ­described it, and then an authentication process to assure the buyer that the item, especially the high luxury goods, are genuine.

“Thanks to the French government there is a charter that exists in France that enables the platform to work with all the houses — so, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Christian Louboutin and so on. We have this agreement. They come to us, they train our teams and we also are able to come back to them (if there are any doubts over a product’s ­authenticity).

“We didn’t invent second-hand (shopping), but we disrupted that market by building trust.”

And the top-selling brands in Australia? “Chanel is over-­performing here, which is more or less the same as in any other country, while Prada is second or third here, which is not the same as other countries.”

The website recently launched its Australian version, with pricing in Australian dollars, and will include seasonal curation and localised editorial content, as well as partnering with local social media influencers.

For now, the platform for this market remains only open to buyers, but once the Hong Kong office is in full swing — hopefully by the end of this year or early next year — those in Australia and Asia will be able to submit items for sale.

There are about 100,000 ­Australian members, which, as Moizant points out, has happened quite organically.

“We always follow the community, so we wait and see the response (before launching into a new market) because it’s a global platform and anyone can shop in the world. This is what happened with Australia, slowly, slowly, month after month, we see a ­bigger community growing ­completely autonomously with no marketing or advertising.

“(Australian) women are really open-minded, clever and smart with how they shop, so it was a perfect signal to say, let’s go to Bondi Beach!”Read more at:evening dresses