Material Wrld combines a community-based photo-sharing site with e-commerce for high-end and contemporary fashion brands, letting users create photo “closets” of favorite items and designers. The product emphasizes discovery and social browsing alongside resale commerce, and recently added search by category and brand as it moves further into commerce. The service has been in beta since August and plans a public platform and mobile app launch next year, with international seller functionality to follow. Today the company reports over 50,000 visitors (35,000 uniques), nearly 8,000 registered users, tripled closets since August, and an average of 10 items uploaded per user; a little over half of listed items are not yet for sale. Early trials captured 6,000 emails, sold more than one-third of items listed in the first trial, and found roughly 20% of purchases in a later trial came from non-U.S. customers. Founders Rie Yano and Jie Zheng—who met in grad school at Harvard—intend to use the new funding to bring product and creative roles in-house and scale toward the public launch.

Total raised

$1M

Funding rounds

1

Latest round

Seed

Latest activity

Dec 2012