Sellier’s founder and chief executive Hanushka Toni speaks to Retail Week about the current challenges within the resale market, expansion plans and the importance of authenticated luxury.
From its recent acquisition of rival Worn to reaching an average basket size of £3,500, Sellier has recorded vast growth since it was founded in 2019 and now claims to be the fastest-growing luxury resale platform in Europe.
How has the business evolved since it was established?
“We started the business around four years ago with my mother as a pure bricks-and-mortar store in Knightsbridge, London. The idea was to have a little shop to capitalise on the foot traffic around Harrods, to sell pre-loved super-brands. At the time, obviously, it was 2020 by the time it really took off so that coincided with Covid. I was working as a creative director of a luxury marketing firm at the time and I realised that unless we took this business online, it wasn’t going to make it past one month of lockdown.
“So I left my job and essentially focused on making Sellier an online resale platform. This was three years ago and it started really small. I built the website myself on Shopify, did the branding myself, designed the logo and we sat down and thought about who we want to be as a business. Obviously, we weren’t the first resale platform, both in the UK and globally, so we really thought hard about what we would be doing that’s different. I thought: ‘Let’s make a resale platform for the super-high-end consumer’ because often at the time resale was associated with getting a saving, maybe with something that wasn’t so desirable.
“I started off with a tiny Instagram account. It wasn’t a hard sell – it was really more of an education piece: why are these pieces amazing? What makes a Chanel bag from 2002 more special than a Chanel bag from 2012?
“We’re three years on and the business has scaled phenomenally since that point. We have doubled revenues every year; we are the only profitable large-scale resale business in the UK.”
How did the pandemic impact Sellier?
“From the point of view of growing the business, it meant that we had almost a captive audience of people sitting at home. We were doing something new and that combination of boredom, isolation and a completely new concept really resonated with people and, for us, it was a period of hyper-growth. It was also a period where everyone was cottoning onto the idea of luxury as an investable asset, as an investment class in its own right.”
What has growth been like and what are your expansion plans?
“We’ve doubled revenues every year since starting the business and we are profitable. We’re expecting 2023 to be our biggest year for growth. At the end of 2022, we acquired one of our competitors in London called Worn and that really consolidated our position as a resale platform in the UK because it bought us an amazing book of sellers. But it also means that people who might have not sold with us but sold with Worn are now really selling with us, so that’s been amazing because we’ve seen a lot more stock come our way.
“For 2023, we’re going to continue expansion in the UK and we have a few really big activation plans. I expect that we will double revenues once again while remaining profitable. In 2024, we are expecting to open in the Middle East, in Dubai.
“I am not looking for a sale or a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. My goal was always to build a financially healthy business that could sustain itself to allow me to do what I love, so that’s why for us profitability is so key because we haven’t had any investment, no external funding and no debt.”
How important are your stores?
“From what I’ve seen, and obviously we now have four stores and we’ve done various pop-ups, pure retail can no longer carry a business alone. What we’ve found is we open a store, but until we advertise it online and on social media and our client base finds out about it, it will be dead.
“Online is at the heart of everything, but what makes us unique is that we’re one of the few players in resale to have physical stores. The reason for that is our stock is quite high-end, so we want to give our customers comfort that if they order something, they aren’t just ordering from somewhere on the internet with nowhere to go if there is a problem. There are actual real physical locations with real people where they can come if there is ever an issue.”
What challenges are you facing in the resale market?
“In terms of the resale market in general, there are a lot of competitors and that is because the barriers to entry are very low. All you need to be able to do is really build a website, but the barriers to getting sales and to making money are quite high because there’s an element of reputation that’s involved and people are scared of shopping with new businesses.
“Also there is that element of first-mover advantage, so now in the UK resale has really been big for, I’d say, four or five years, so a lot of people have their preferred business who they would like to shop with.
“While there are lots of competitors, we are going to see a lot of consolidation both at the lower end and also in the mid and top ends, with businesses merging and being acquired.”
How important is your authentication process?
“Sellier is a business where you live and die by your reputation, especially when you’re selling such expensive things. When a product comes in, first of all, our team on site will inspect the item. Afterwards it goes to an independent authenticator for that particular brand. As a final step, we run everything through a system called Entrupy.
“Entrupy uses artificial intelligence and microscopic technology. It runs through a database of millions of fake and real products and then it comes back with a response. Each step we’ve tested extensively, but that in particular is completely bullet-proof and we can really know that each product we are selling is 100% authentic.
“Our business model is low-volume, high-margin, focusing on the best of the best, so for us it is really important that we do take all those steps.”
- Get the latest fashion news and analysis straight to your inbox – sign up for our weekly newsletter
No comments yet