In this article:
- Reseller Poshmark has acquired Suede One to authenticate the sneakers it offers for sale.
- Using tech to guarantee authenticity wins customer confidence and loyalty in the competitive worlds of both high-end sneakers and secondhand fashion.
How do you know you got the real deal when you buy pre-owned? With guaranteed authentication.
Poshmark, the popular social marketplace for new and secondhand styles, just announced its acquisition of Suede One, a platform that combines machine learning, computer vision, and expert human review to virtually authenticate sneakers.
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Sued One is a very new company, dating only to 2020. It is designed to make it possible to take “an inventoryless approach to authentication” by drawing on images to identify if the item is authentic or fake.
It boasts a “greater than 99% accuracy” for the fully automatic authentication of sneaker styles like Jordan 1s and Yeezy 350s. For others, human experts review items using its tool.
“We built this company to solve a key challenge for the reseller community—creating technology that protects them from fraud and ensures fast, accurate authentication that they can rely on,” said Matt Forloine, CEO of Suede One.
This is the first acquisition deal for Poshmark. It’s aimed at drawing on innovative solutions to gain the interest of both buyers and sellers and improve their experience in the heated-up market for the resale of high-end sneakers.
Manish Chandra, founder, and CEO of Poshmark observed: “Suede One has built impressive capabilities in virtual authentication that will allow us to deliver tangible benefits to our community, scale our authentication services in a meaningful way, and accelerate our momentum in sneakers as well as luxury goods, two of the fastest-growing categories in the resale space.”
Guaranteed authenticity and protection from counterfeits are integral to Poshmark’s branding that includes Posh Authenticate for items priced at $500 or more. Having this automated capability will allow Poshmark to scale up and to take on more buyers and sellers of these highly-prized sneakers and expand into more categories.
No doubt committing significant resources for such customer-first initiative helps build a more meaningful relationship with buyers.