Well Made

89 Letting Community Lead the Way with Manish Chandra, founder of Poshmark

Episode Summary

We sit down with Poshmark founder and CEO, Manish Chandra to talk about the logistics of their resale marketplace, and building social ecommerce experiences.

Episode Notes

For the last 15 years, Manish Chandra has motivated pivotal shifts in how and where we buy things. Manish is the CEO of Poshmark, a social marketplace for people to buy and sell secondhand fashion and home goods. Long before founding Poshmark, he was creating social shopping experiences online. An engineer and marketer by trade, he believes in connecting community and technology, with people at the platform’s core. Community guides all the decisions that he makes for his company.

On this episode, Manish talks about the logistics of online consumer-to-consumer resale (7:39). He shares how Poshmark negotiated PoshPost, the first-ever USPS shipping label designed for the marketplace economy (9:19). Most ecommerce plays start on the web and then move to mobile — Poshmark bet on an iPhone app first. Hear how they design their app as the expectations for selling pre-owned items evolve (12:21). He talks about challenging linear growth (15:56) and the Marie Kondo effect (23:46). Manish wants consumers to rethink the merchandising for social (31:50), and how Poshmark facilitates discovery amidst millions of items on the platform (33:04). Finally, Manish shares how he’s fostering an authentic community (36:59) and steadily growing their big ideas, even when it means taking a step back (43:27).

Also mentioned on the show:

Links and images and can be found on the Lumi blog.