A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR

And now, the main event…

Multibrand retail has weathered endless industry storms over the last decade, from the rise of e-commerce and the pre-pandemic brick-and-mortar apocalypse to the post-pandemic e-commerce slowdown and brick-and-mortar resurgence. The last five years have been particularly demoralizing, punctuated by the fire sales of Farfetch and Matches, the Saks Global bankruptcy, the Ssense restructuring, etcetera.

Elizabeth von der Goltz has been around for all of it, and worked for almost everyone. She got her start at Bergdorf Goodman in the early 2000s before transitioning to e-commerce in the 2010s with stints at Yoox Net-a-Porter, Matches, and Farfetch. In January, she joined the peer-to-peer reseller Poshmark as its new chief revenue officer.

A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR

Poshmark had a soaring I.P.O. in 2021, but was taken private the following year by South Korean e-commerce giant Naver after consecutive quarterly losses and declining sales growth. Von der Goltz told me that Poshmark is profitable now, likely buttressed by the broader resale boom. Her unusual remit encompasses defining the platform’s brand identity as it chases a broader cultural footprint.

In a recent conversation, von der Goltz told me why Poshmark needs a brand refresh, what eBay acquiring Depop revealed about the state of resale, and what it will take for the embattled traditional retail industry to rebound. As usual, our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Malique Morris: What was Poshmark’s pitch to you?

Elizabeth von der Goltz: In my time consulting and meeting with a lot of startups, resale kept coming up. The other thing that came up was social commerce. When the Poshmark opportunity came, it was actually really funny, because they’re a Silicon Valley tech business. They haven’t had this merchant, brand, creative marketing side of the business. The C.E.O. [Namsun Kim], who led the acquisition for Naver, had this vision of where this business could go, and so they reached out to me. It was kismet. I was like: resale, peer-to-peer, Silicon Valley–tech enabled. It checked every box. What’s been your biggest takeaway about Poshmark’s position in the resale market? Ever since I started, or it was announced that I was joining, all of a sudden every single person I know has been on Poshmark forever. My 10-year-old goddaughter has her own shop on it. All of a sudden, all the fashion people are like, “We love Poshmark. We’ve been using it.” How do I now take all this and build the brand? How do we bring it to the forefront of everyone’s mind? In week two, I turned to my team and said, “We’re going to do an event for New York Fashion Week.” They’d never done anything like that before. How do you give a platform like Poshmark a fresh brand identity? The rest of the world does use it as a verb—to posh something. There are poshers. Our demographic is wider than just the fashion industry. My job is now to make it ubiquitous. We’re going to build our brand by bringing the idea of human curation and taste, but letting the machine learn from us, and algorithms learn from that. My role, and why I joined the business, is to bring that idea of fashion authority and inspiration into our experience, and then how we show up physically. What are Poshmark’s biggest challenges, and how are you navigating them? We’re actually a growing, healthy, profitable business. A lot of my past experiences have been coming in and having to fix businesses. I’m here to build.

If it’s already in a place of strength, why does the company need a branding refresh?

Accelerated growth. Think about what’s happening in the resale space right now. You’ve got the ThredUps, which are much lower price point and a very targeted generational audience. Then you have these luxury players that can’t even sell things under a certain price point. There’s this whole white space in between that’s a very large market share. That’s kind of where we sit, and from there we can go up.

Etsy just sold Depop to eBay for $1.2 billion. How does Poshmark view that type of consolidation?

It was really interesting, because the sector has been quite fragmented.

What that sale did is really validate the importance and value of the secondary market in fashion today.

Has this sparked any internal conversations of, “Do we need to buy something? Do we need to acquire somebody?” I can’t talk about that now. But I do want to be a solution to the inventory that’s out there. What lessons did you learn from Farfetch, Matches, and YNAP that you’re applying to Poshmark? When you think about some of these businesses I’ve worked for, they built themselves on their brand from the beginning. Because I come from a luxury background, in that world, what we’ve done across those other platforms is really to build the idea of trust, a very clear point of view and curation. But I’ve also learned from some of these businesses that it’s really important to have a very clear brand identity and integrity and framework of how we grow our business. There’s a lot of growing for growth’s sake, and just expanding, expanding, expanding—and not thinking about putting the customer at the heart of the business. As a retail veteran, what do you make of all the bankruptcies and closures? What are some plausible changes the industry can invest in? Everyone kept knowing what was coming next, and where the consumer was going, but a lot of these traditional retailers didn’t grasp how fast everything was moving. As much as they were trying to change, they really weren’t changing enough, and not necessarily thinking about how to structure their business to survive the future. We think about how stores used to run themselves in the past. Every year we grew and were extremely profitable. When you really think about how you curate, how you partner with brands, how you have an amazing experience for your customer and make sure that you’re changing with how their consumer patterns are changing, I do think there’s an opportunity now.

Finally, someone did the Mango-murder story! [The Cut]

Macron awarded Stella McCartney the Légion d’Honneur in Paris this week. It feels like these various honors are doled out on a regular basis. Who decides who gets them? What are the different distinctions? How many do they give out each year? How do I get one? [Vogue] The LVMH Prize is pretty great for designers and even better as a feeder into LVMH. If I were a designer, I would skip the Fashion Fund and just do this. It’s more valuable. [WWD] A lot of people are talking about Ryan Murphy’s Love Story this week: what they got right, what they got wrong, why it’s good, and why it’s dumb. The one thing everyone can agree on is that Calvin Klein required everyone to use black paperclips. Here’s more on what the Calvin office really looked like back then, as well as a very nice interview with Narciso Rodriguez about Carolyn Bessette’s wedding dress. [WWD and The Cut]

Until Monday, Lauren

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