As cofounder, chief executive officer and driving force of ThredUp Inc., James Reinhart is used to being a pioneer.
And now — as Wall Street wonders over the company’s number, dealing it a 36 percent stock decline on Thursday — Reinhart is looking to take secondhand to the still-unestablished frontier of live selling online.
In essence, the CEO caught the live-selling bug and is betting big that his company can grow through a concept that has taken off in China, but so far has failed to engage U.S. shoppers.
Even QVC Group, the spiritual home of live selling in the U.S., emerged from bankruptcy just in August and is working to find its way forward in the category.
ThredUp is now taking its own shot.
For now, Wall Street is holding way back, with the stock down 79 cents in midday trading to $1.40, leaving the company with a market capitalization of $184 million.
ThredUp’s revenues rose 7 percent to $88.2 million for the third quarter ended Sept. 30. The active buyer count rose 16 percent to 1.8 million. Losses widened to $5.5 million from $4.2 million a year earlier.
But for the fourth quarter, revenues are expected to come in at $77 million to $79 million, a 2 percent drop at the midpoint, where analysts were looking for an 8.2 percent increase, according to Yahoo Finance.
Dylan Carden, an analyst at William Blair, cut his rating on the stock to “market perform” from “outperform” as the outlook disappointed.
“ThredUp reported a relatively in-line third quarter, but another guide-down overshadowed otherwise healthy marketplace trends and a more general upbeat tone around the underlying business,” Carden said.
“ThredUp is facing heightened competition on two fronts, with a more promotional holiday backdrop across traditional retail and elevated marketing and shipping subsidies across peer-to-peer resale sites Vinted and Depop as they fight for share,” he said.
ThredUp is now going to have dozens of new faces leading that fight.
Reinhart acknowledged that he was “a live-selling hater for a while, despite it being huge in Asia,” but came around as the company started testing the waters on the live-selling platform Whatnot in September.
“I was watching a guy who was selling golf clubs of all things and golf hats and stuff,” Reinhart said of his live-selling epiphany. “It was really interesting, the way he engaged with the audience and the comments. And all of a sudden there was this community element and I found myself watching it for 20 minutes. I’m like, ‘Huh.’”
Now he sees it as magic and, more importantly, fun.
“Live [shopping] is a really great example of people being like, ‘Oh, there’s texture here in the shopping experience and it’s fun.’ And one of my bets is that fun is going to be an increasingly important part of how people are going to shop in the future.”
ThredUp is hiring dozens of hosts and plans to run 10 studios for 18 hours a day.
“Call it 180 hours a day of live [shopping] is where we’re scaling to over the next couple of months,” the CEO said. “And so some estimate that the average GMV or sales per hour could be a thousand bucks or more.
“The median price of items sold live is substantially higher than what we sell it on ThredUp because of two things. One, being able to see it creates higher willingness to pay. And the second is the auction dynamics. The median is 52 percent higher live.”
If that rate holds as ThredUp hits the live shopping accelerator, Wall Street is going to take a second look at the company.
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