Secondhand Clothing Marketplace Twice Raises $18.5M From Andreessen Horowitz
Online fashion marketplaces are fast picking up steam these days, quickly replacing the traditional auction model pioneered by eBay, as a way to consign, and sell your clothes. Twice, an online consignment shop …
Context & Ripple Effects
Twice has been building toward this round since at least October 2012, when it made headlines with an unusual $1M bounty to acquire Y Combinator, TechStars, or 500 Startups-backed companies — an aggressive talent-and-tech grab for an early-stage consignment shop. Today's $18.5M Series led by Andreessen Horowitz converts that ambition into real capital.
The pickup was unusually broad for a mid-stage consumer deal: VentureBeat, Business Insider, and even Y Combinator's own Posthaven all carried the story on or about January 16, 2014, reflecting how contested the online-fashion resale narrative had become. The framing across outlets is consistent: managed consignment marketplaces are displacing eBay's do-it-yourself auction model for selling clothes.
First-order effects
- Twice gains $18.5M led by Andreessen Horowitz to scale its consignment operation — inventory intake, pricing, and fulfillment — where capital intensity is the moat against smaller resale startups.
- Andreessen Horowitz's lead marks a top-tier VC endorsement of vertical fashion marketplaces, validating the category beyond seed-stage bets.
Second-order effects
- The raise pressures eBay's clothing business directly: sellers of apparel now have a funded alternative that handles photography, pricing, and shipping rather than leaving the work to the seller.
- Competing consignment players must match Twice's capitalization or differentiate on niche (luxury, kids', vintage), because the managed-marketplace playbook requires heavy operational spend that bootstrapped rivals cannot easily sustain.
Third-order effects
- If consignment keeps winning share from auctions, secondhand commerce restructures around full-service operators who take custody of goods — raising the capital bar for entry and pushing the market toward fewer, larger platforms rather than long-tail seller communities.
The trend: Online resale is shifting from seller-does-everything auction models like eBay's toward capitalized managed-consignment marketplaces, with venture funding rounds as the consolidation mechanism.