Vestiaire Wear

In less than a decade, Vestiaire Collective has become the go-to for online sales of secondhand fashion

There was a time when eBay was pretty much the only viable re-commerce platform around. But what if, in the years before 2009, you were a fashion lover who wanted to buy or sell top-quality designer clothing or accessories? Aside from eBay and its notorious unreliability for high-end goods, there was the inconvenience of buying from individual bloggers or (millennial shocker!) brick-and-mortar secondhand shops.

For Fanny Moizant, one of the six founders of online designer resale boutique Vestiaire Collective, it was that inconvenience of buying from bloggers that nudged her to start the online luxury consignment app, which currently has more than seven million users. "The light bulb moment for us was that the girls with fashion blogs couldn't maintain wearing new outfits every day and had to sell what they wore on their blogs," explains the French tech entrepreneur, who moved from Paris to London in 2013, then to Hong Kong last year. "I was personally interested in buying, but the correspondence and payment was very inconvenient.