Treet, Unbundled

Treet helps fashion brands become more circular and control the secondhand market for the items they produce by launching their own fully-branded resale experience. On Treet-powered sites, customers can buy and sell used items from each other in exchange for cash or credit back to the brand. Treet handles all of the logistics and support while brands share in the profit. Treet closed a $2.8 million seed round in May 2021 with financing from Bling Capital, Matchstick Ventures, Techstars, BAM Ventures, BBG Ventures, Green Meadow, Interlace Ventures, V1.VC and Alante Capital.

We had the pleasure to interview Treet’s CEO/Co-Founder, Jake Disraeli for this piece. We’re excited for Jake to give us an insight into working with various fashion brands on a largely technical side of the business. 

1. Can you tell us a bit more about Treet and its mission?

Our mission is to make secondhand feel firsthand for brands and customers around the world. The fashion industry is a leading contributor of greenhouse gasses worldwide and resale represents a promising path toward greater circularity. By working directly with fashion brands to help their customers embrace resale, the ripple effects of our platform will be felt around the world as more and more consumers shift to secondhand shopping.

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2. How have you seen the Recommerce market evolve since you founded Treet?

The brand-driven recommerce market has evolved alongside traditional resale, with resale growing 11x faster than retail. Resale is projected to be 2x as big as fast fashion in the next 5 years. This boom has come on the heels of companies like ThredUp and Poshmark’s popularity, which coincides with the conscious consumerism movement. In 2021 maybe a handful of brands were participating in resale, but now that number has more than 10x’ed. We are just at the beginning of a massive wave where recommerce will become table stakes for brands and consumers. 

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3. When does resale make sense for brands to consider?

Resale makes the most sense for brands that have been in the market for more than a couple of years and when the items are of higher quality and price point. Because 90% of secondhand shoppers are women, we've seen the most activity on brand-driven recommerce from brands that sell primarily to women.

4. Generally, how do brands evaluate a potential commerce tech solution like yours? 

Brands care about setup time, the look + feel of the site, and the end user experience. We often find that our key differentiator comes with the ease of setup. Competitors to Treet can take up to 8 weeks to set up the resale operation, but Treet takes under a week. Brands also love that it doesn’t take any engineering time to get setup on Treet - all the brand team has to do is download the shopify app, fill out a questionnaire, and let the Treet team handle it from there. 

Brands love that Treet is able to mirror their brand aesthetic on the resale site, and offer as much customization as possible. Brands want to be hands off with resale, and they like that Treet takes on the hassle of logistics, disputes, support - all of the elements of resale that brands would otherwise be taking on themselves.  Additionally, the user experience on Treet is very thoughtful and our NPS score is really high. A consumer only needs to make a Treet account once, and they can automatically shop all brands that have resale operations managed by Treet. This feels more social for the consumer, and makes them more part of a community. 

5. How do you think critically about building integrations with the largest ecommerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, and Headless?

We chose to integrate with shopify first because that’s where the majority of apparel brands are. Even brands that are using a headless frontend are often using shopify on the backend. That being said, Treet can and will easily integrate with any e-commerce platform from Commerce Cloud to Wix.

6. What are the top three key integrations that makes Treet work so well?

Key integrations for us include; Zapier, Shippo, and Stripe connect which powers disbursements. 

7. What advice would you give to commerce technology founders who are building closed-loop (circular) business models like yours? 

In order for a closed loop system to work in the long term, the benefits have to work for several stakeholders. The margins have to make sense. A circular business model has to make sense for brands, platforms, and users all at the same time. If you can’t nail this and do it affordably, long term it won’t be the best solution. 

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8. Without giving too much away, what tips would you give b2b founders during their sales process? 

First and foremost would be: to sell the product before you have the product. We spent months talking to apparel brands about what a resale program could and should look like for them. It got us our first 3 customers and into TechStars. Before you have a product you should be talking to the customers you want to target. Don’t undervalue your initial customers. You should obsess over making sure that they’re happy and successful on the platform. Those first customers are your biggest evangelists for getting your next 10 customers and for securing VC investment.