Celebrity Life

“We disrupted the second-hand market by bringing trust,” says Moizant, recalling her own experience. “In real life, I know who you are and I feel confident buying from you, but there’s none of that on this type of platform. I wouldn’t know the girl I would buy from so I had to make sure. There’s a trust component between me, the buyer and the centre and we needed to figure out how to build something that prevents that kind of fear that we’d experience as consumers on eBay 10 to 15 years ago. This is why we feel that the physical check – where the product goes from their home to our centres to be authenticated before being sent to its new home – is so necessary.”

True to its name, the site has built a strong social component. “When we thought it up, we imagined it as swapping closet contents among a group of friends. We wanted to keep that social element very strong on the platform,” says Moizant. “So we wanted to build a social network, rather than pure and traditional e-commerce. That’s why there’s profile-to-profile interaction. Customers can speak to the seller and exchange information. They can follow each other. There are many social aspects.”

It’s an element that’s crucial to the buying and verification process, Moizant explains, because what often happens is that if an item is a fake, the seller doesn’t know it – “because it’s so beautiful, they were using it themselves. The quality of fakes is becoming more accurate and many are very good.”

Now every item of second-hand merchandise sold through the Vestiaire website is examined by one of the team’s 20 experts, each of whom has in-depth experience gained either working at one of the fashion houses or with an auctioneer, and in areas such as watches, jewellery and leather goods.

When the company expanded to Asia, it brought experts with it “who are now working here and who have been trained for years at Vestiaire. We’ve even built an academy within the company so that every new ‘expert’ we hire enters the school and has programmes they must go through. Then they’ll be coached by a senior expert for a few months, so we’re really building up a system to have our experts up to speed with our requirements,” says Moizant.

[caption id="attachment_168957" align="alignnone" width="853"] Examining goods for sale at Vestiaire Collective[/caption]

Each step of the purchasing process on the website is also filtered for fakes. “We cross curate,” she says, “so we havepeople selecting the products on the database. At that step we already have a lot of mechanisms in place to detect weird behaviour, new sellers who come and drop a tonne of weird things.” (On which subject, Moizant recalls a man who once tried to sell his car on the platform and another a wig. Some bags of garments also contained years of unpaid parking tickets and others wads of cash. And, of course, she’ll always remember the fluorescent pink crocodile Birkin costing more than €200,000 (approximately HK$1.7 million), its hardware entirely paved with diamonds, which was driven to the company’s headquarters in a Brinks armoured truck before the seller experienced remorse and had it returned.)