An Ecomm Platform made for Resellers
January 24, 2024
I was introduced to Josh and Vendela, cofounders of Ribbn, last year, when I had just started my business. They were running a high-end thrift shop in Sweden called ReRobe, and had also started building out some software to help them with their thrift shop’s online presence. This is how many successful businesses start, they solve their own problem and provide the solution to everyone else who has the same problem.
Me, Vendela + Josh (and a nutcracker) in NYC during the holidays.
Starting a physical store was the perfect way for them to learn what software they needed to build, not only to support themselves, but to support the many many physical and online thrift stores in Sweden, the United States, and beyond. While they started with a more piecemeal approach, they soon realized that they needed to build a full e-commerce system in order for each of their pieces of software to work together and be fully functional. Without building a full system their users would be forced to right-size the pieces that they were missing, which were not built with resale in mind.
I think that is the differentiator for what they are building with Ribbn: the foundation is resale. The products and solutions you make when you start with resale as your baseline are going to be very different from products and solutions you would make with manufacturing new goods and selling them. As I have alluded to before in this newsletter, the basic functionality across teams like finance and marketing and operations are fundamentally different for resale, and trying to adjust existing systems to support resale is a challenge. I can imagine for users of the Ribbn software, starting with a system that was built for resale is a relief. For example, setting up products on Shopify or other popular e-commerce platforms is a process designed to sell hundreds or thousands of the exact same item in different sizes or colors. Setting up a resale item usually means you are creating one of one that you may never sell again. It necessitates a much faster set up because if a reseller wants to sell 100 items, they probably need to set up 100 items individually in their system. In contrast, for new goods, they could sell 100 of the same item that they only had to set up one time.
Josh, who builds the software, lasers in on the problems that a reseller may encounter and builds to help relieve that issue. For example, they have leveraged AI to help sellers create listings super quickly.
One hard-earned lesson along the way was Vendela’s rejection on Swedish Shark Tank. The investors didn’t see the opportunity with Ribbn, and she walked away without any investments. (Read about the experience in her words here.) When the episode finally aired, many secondhand stores reached out to Ribbn because they wanted to buy their software; there is actually growing demand for this, and honestly I wonder if Vendela went on Shark Tank too early! This demand helped Ribbn adjust its product direction to become a service software that other resellers could pay to use (otherwise known as “SaaS” which is just too lingo-heavy for my readers, especially my MVP reader, my mom who likes to give me feedback every week).
While chatting with them, Josh and Vendela couldn’t stop referencing Shopify, which represents almost 30% of US ecommerce businesses. Shopify sells itself as a one-stop shop for ecommerce businesses, and that is what Josh wants Ribbn to be for resale businesses. “If we can do that with resale, we would be doing a good thing for the planet and consumers. We can empower more people to become entrepreneurs.” All of the people signing up for Ribbn are full-time, professional resellers. In February 2023 Ribbn accepted a few users for a testing period; the most eager were running larger, digital-first resale companies doing $1M+ in annual sales. Many had started selling on marketplaces or social media and had hired developers to make Shopify or WooCommerce work better for their resale needs. Enter Ribbn!
Ribbn helps in 2 areas / main differentiators:
They help merchants manage one of a kind or limited quantities SKUs (stock keeping units). You can upload items really fast, and there is also an accompanying mobile app so lots of different sellers can add to a store’s inventory.
They focus on vendor management, meaning: who owns each item, who’s going to be paid, who’s selling a lot, etc. Resale is driven by individuals bringing their items in or selling them online and tracking all of this can be super manual.
Josh has built a whole resale ecommerce engine; he realized he couldn’t just do one part of it, he had to do all of it because each piece was dependent on the other.
The co-founders just raised a pre-seed round of $800k, and this Spring they are going to onboard more customers from their wait list. I also find it interesting that the largest P2P marketplace in Sweden, Tradera, is supporting Ribbn’s tech because their merchants are asking for the kind of tech that Ribbn has already built. In Sweden, and I believe in the US as well, the majority of sales on peer-to-peer marketplaces are actually coming from professional resellers, not plebeians like you and me.
The term plebeian referred to all free Roman citizens who were not members of the patrician, senatorial or equestrian classes. Working class heroes. Plebeians were average working citizens of Rome – farmers, bakers, builders or craftsmen – who worked hard to support their families and pay their taxes. (link)
At the end of the day, Vendela and Josh seem most excited about elevating the resale experience so that it becomes just like how we shop for everything else. They want customers to forget that they are shopping secondhand in order to increase the resale market overall.
I wish them all the luck!
I hope you learned something (I did).
Podcast
Hoping for additional exposure and maybe some media coverage, we wrote a press release for The Untangling Circularity Podcast’s Season 2 launch. I’ve never done that before, so a big thanks to our friends who helped! I feel like there’s a new first every day these days.
Ciao for now,
Cynthia
cynthia@moltevolte.com
