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Stephanie Crespin, CEO and Founder of Reflaunt, is an entrepreneur with a passion for luxury fashion. With a background in business engineering and experience at Procter & Gamble, after selling her 1st company, Styletribute in the resale space, she launched Reflaunt in 2018.

Based in Singapore, Reflaunt offers an online resell e-commerce platform, facilitating the resale of pre-loved apparel directly through retailers' websites. Stephanie's vision is to drive a circular future in fashion, empowering consumers to resell or repurpose their items while boosting brand loyalty.

1. What ‘aha’ moment led to the founding of Reflaunt?

During the scaling of my first company, StyleTribute - a second-hand luxury marketplace in SEA - three significant challenges emerged. These included:

• Acquiring faster and more supply of luxury items;
• Reducing unit economics and operational scaling efficiency;
• Boosting the sell-through of collected items.

It was apparent that it didn't make sense that the same customer was buying and reselling the same item yet though 2 disconnected experiences.

The realization struck when I grasped that connecting the first and second-hand markets, could address and solve my challenges:

• By collaborating with brands, Reflaunt tapped into the right customer base with the right supply without acquisition costs.
• Working directly with brands minimized content creation from scratch, eliminating photography and product enrichment as it is sourced directly from the brand catalog.
• Bridging the connection with the existing second-hand market tapped into a vast global audience of over 500 million shoppers without acquisition costs and allows us to maximize sellthrough and payout for customers.

2. What was your drive back then? What change did you want to make?

The "aha" moment revealed that bringing all key industry stakeholders of the space together—brands, customers, and marketplaces—could unleash the full magnitude of resale and accelerate fashion's shift toward circularity.

Integrated and branded resale is more than just about giving a 2nd life to products, it’s also about reframing the value around fashion pieces. With fast fashion, we have bought into the idea that fashion is disposable. However, the growth of the resale market has demonstrated that items crafted with quality maintain their value over time and can be resold at a decent price after several wears. The resale market thus benefits brands that invest in the durability of their products and that achieve desirability beyond the 1st hand market. This, in turn, impacts the way people shop and make their first-hand shopping choices.

Finally, this new way of consuming also improves the level of care people put into their items as they may consider selling them in the future.

3. How does Reflaunt's platform significantly contribute to the circular economy of fashion, and what specific market gap does it address?

Reflaunt contributes to the circular economy by diverting products from landfills and extending the life cycle of items in wardrobes.

Most importantly, Reflaunt is also transforming the shopping journey, allowing customers to easily put back on sale and extend their item's life cycle.

As for second-hand shoppers, Reflaunt is accelerating the growth of the 2nd hand market assortment and elevating it to another standard with more trust and higher quality content and description of the product.

Here are a few KPIs around our impact:

1. Impact of buying a single second-hand item instead of a new one, according to the industry average:

• 8.41 pounds of CO2 emission
• 16.46 KWh energy savings
• 88.89 gallons of water

2. Based on this, Reflaunt just last year achieved the following:

• 43,000 pounds of CO2e emissions
• 96,000 KWh of energy
• 520,000 gallons of water

3. In the same year, for just Hermes items sold we saved:

• 1,400 pounds of CO2
• 2,800 KWh energy savings
• 15,100 gallons of water

4. To put in perspective / some catchy comparisons the likes of Thredup use often:

• 43k CO2 = 50 thousand miles driven by car
• 96k KWh saved = electricity for 13 avg US homes for 1 year
• 520k gallons of water saved = 1.5 year consumption of the average US household

4. How do you scale your business and drive financial success with Reflaunt's operations?

In this new era, I don’t believe you can successfully build a business that is not both financially viable and sustainable. It needs to combine both. That’s what I love about our model, it’s a powerful loyalty, re-engagement, and acquisition tool while it transforms our linear model into a circular one and diverts products from landfills.

Unit economics in resale have historically had a bad reputation; dual cost of acquisition (a cost to acquire supply and a cost to acquire buyers), high operational cost to process each single item, and then finally costs around inefficient sellthrough. With our model and technology, we have eliminated marketing costs as we capture the brand’s database of customers sitting on the desirable inventory. We have scaled the operational piece by partnering with operational experts including DHL, powered by our software.

We grow loyalty, and AOV for brands and help them acquire new customers, this in turn allows us to generate a new revenue stream for ourselves, in turn increasing margins.

5. What are potential exit scenarios for investors supporting Reflaunt?

Exit scenarios encompass both M&A or IPO, with potential interest from operational providers like DHL, marketplaces such as eBay or Amazon, luxury retailers like Netaporter or Kering, and e-commerce or payment platforms like Shoplift or Klarna.

6. How do you envision Reflaunt's future growth within the fashion technology sector?

Reflaunt aims to become an underpinning infrastructure connecting brands, marketplaces, and operators in the fashion technology sector. The technology powers the entire value chain, from pickup to distribution, maximizing efficiency, and reducing unit costs by 75% in the past year.

7. Do you have a mentor or person you admire in the fashion or tech industry?

Natalie Massenet and Yvon Chouinard.

8. Why should investors consider being part of Reflaunt's journey?

The addressable market opportunity represents 3 trillion and brands/retailers are faced with increasing pressure from legislation and customers

The Founder and executive team behind the company have more than 10 years in resale and luxury tech space, with relevant experience building and selling businesses in the secondary market

We have demonstrated excellence in execution and appetite of the biggest brands as we signed and are powering resale for leading companies in the space (Saks off, Netaporter, COS, Balenciaga, Level shoes among others)

We have demonstrated and scaled outstanding value generation for customers, increasing 3.5x the lifetime value of their clients.

We have cracked the model to scale resale, acquiring supply with the biggest brands/retailers (Balenciaga 2B, Netaporter 1.4B, COS x), scaled sell-through and sales through our network of more than 30 Marketplaces (more than 500M shoppers) and are now driving operational efficiency with global partners like DHL.

Explore the opportunity on SeedBlink.