thredUP Launches Kids Clothing Exchange Website

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., April 12 /PRNewswire/ -- thredUP, the premier peer-to-peer online clothing exchange, today announced the launch of its much-anticipated service for kids clothing. thredUP kids is the place for America's busiest families to conveniently exchange kids clothing online.
The service aims to bring a new level of affordability, convenience and eco-consciousness to a highly fragmented, billion-dollar market for second-hand children's clothing. thredUP kids is designed to help parents easily swap clothes their kids have outgrown for great new items that fit. thredUP's best-in-class interface allows parents to exchange with their closest friends or with a national network of parents -- all from the convenience of home.

thredUP kids combines the best features of some of the most popular sites on the web: Like Netflix, parents can queue up a box of gently used clothes to receive. Then, similar to eBay, members build virtual boxes of clothing to exchange. Finally, like StubHub, thredUP enables, coordinates and manages the exchanges. The marketplace facilitates exact matches, ensures quality and remedies the lack of coordination that plagues offline clothing swaps. The service is a complete end-to-end solution for busy parents.

"Children grow out of clothes every 3-6 months, having worn outfits only a couple of times," said James Reinhart, Chief Knitwit of thredUP. "Currently parents are spending upwards of $20,000 on kids clothing by the time their child is 17. And they're retiring some 1,400 items! We've found that many 'swap, buy, sell' sites are not that enticing to busy parents. They are just too much work. thredUP is all about convenience."

The kids service launches on the heels of the popular men's and women's shirt-swapping site, which went live in October 2009. While this service already has 10,000 members, the team anticipates that thredUP kids will be an even bigger hit in the hand-me-down market.

"The initial feedback has been tremendous," said Oliver Lubin, Chief Design Knitwit. "In the first two weeks of a private beta launch we have over 1,500 excited parents signed-up to start swapping. Members seem to love the intuitive interface and overall thredUP experience."
The service launches invite-only today. For more information about thredUP kids visit: thredup.com

About the company
thredUP.com is the brainchild of co-founders James Reinhart, Oliver Lubin, and Chris Homer. Both Reinhart and Homer are recent graduates of the Harvard Business School and all three developed the idea in the Spring of 2009. The company is based in Cambridge, MA and is advised by current Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.

SOURCE thredUP