Gently (fka Wearloom)

Gently, formerly known as Wearloom, operates as a central aggregator for the secondhand fashion market, aiming to simplify the online thrift shopping experience. The company was founded in March 2021 by college friends Samuel Spitz and Kunal Rai. Spitz, an avid second-hand shopper, conceived the idea after experiencing the frustration of wasting hours searching across numerous resale websites for specific items. This personal pain point directly shaped the company's mission to make secondhand shopping as convenient as using a major online retailer like Amazon.

The platform functions as a search engine for pre-owned apparel, allowing consumers to browse listings from a wide array of resale marketplaces simultaneously. Its core service provides users with advanced search, filtering, and personalized alert capabilities, saving them significant time in finding specific items. Early in its history, the founders manually fulfilled search requests by handpicking items from sites like Poshmark and emailing them to users, a lean approach that helped them validate the concept and attract their first customers. The business has since automated this process. Gently partners with major players in the resale industry, including Poshmark, Depop, eBay, ThredUp, Vestiaire Collective, Grailed, and StockX, among others.

The service is free for shoppers. Gently's business model is based on earning a commission from its partner platforms for the sales it generates. In September 2022, the company secured $2 million in a pre-seed funding round from over 20 investors, including prominent names like Jason Calacanis' Launch, Austen Allred of Bloom Tech, Jon Oringer of Shutterstock, and venture capital firms such as Dorm Room Fund and V1VC. At the time of the funding, the platform had amassed 10,000 users and stated its ambition to grow to one million shoppers by 2024, with plans to expand into other categories like furniture and to integrate machine learning to enhance its search functionality.

Keywords: resale aggregator, secondhand fashion, online thrift store, clothing search engine, Poshmark alerts, Depop search, fashion marketplace, pre-owned apparel, sustainable fashion, circular economy, thrift shopping tool, e-commerce aggregator, Samuel Spitz, Kunal Rai, Wearloom, save money on clothes, fashion deals, clothing alerts, item finder, cross-platform search