In this interview, Brendan Candon explains how his company sources all of its inventory through trade‑in events, which forced them to build better marketplace tools that mirror sellers' needs. He describes the dual purpose of these events: to secure supply in a category lacking aggregators and to develop internal processes (warehouse operations, trade‑in logistics) that can be packaged as tools for third‑party sellers. Candon envisions a future where sellers adopt these tools, run their own trade‑in programs, and the company can step back to operate purely as a marketplace. He positions trade‑in as the "north star" for delivering the widest selection at the best prices, aiming to become the largest sports marketplace. While acknowledging potential conflicts of interest, he stresses guardrails to avoid unfair advantage, viewing competition with sellers as a long‑term strategic thesis rather than a short‑term threat.
Chapters
You mentioned owning inventory to sort of compete with retailers that have a higher margin. Is that something you all are still looking to scale and expand upon? And do you feel like owning inventory is potentially a conflicting pitch to sellers? Maybe things for brand new specifically, just kind of what's your take on, and I assume you're selling the gear from your trade-ins. So you're kind of, kind of headed down that road anyway. So I kind of just want to get your insights on that.
Yeah. So it's the only stuff we sell is from the trade-in events that we run. It's forced us to build a better marketplace because now we're feeling the pain points our sellers are. So I think that's part of it. It's like, one, we use the same tools that they use to sell on the marketplace. Like, we can only do what they could do. We also give them— we're, we're making the tools that we use for our trade-in events available to our sellers. So our goal, like, I would love to never have had to do trade-in events. Like, if we could have just been Poshmark and it was just growing like crazy and we didn't have to think about it, like, that would have been awesome. But we just weren't getting enough supply and there weren't enough aggregators in our category. So we felt like we had to build some tools and go do these things. To help, you know, satisfy the demand side, basically. And we are teaching our sellers to do the same things that we are. We'll like show them our warehouse operations and show them our, you know, here's how we run trade-in events. Like we would love for them to go do these things and take a step back. If we're not running, you know, trade-in events in a couple of years, that because our sellers copied us and figured it all out and have grown the sporting goods used market. Significantly and we could just sit on top of that as a marketplace, I'll be totally happy, right? Like that, that would be great. I don't know if that will happen, but like our thinking is that trade-in is like our north star at the end of the day is to provide the best selection of inventory at the best prices so that way we can build the largest marketplace in sports. And, you know, it's not necessarily, it's not Shopify's mission to like serve service sellers. Right? Because like that isn't, that is not our goal. Our goal is to build the largest marketplace, the largest selection. And so we think about trade-in within that, right? Like, okay, we can turn this on and have it, ThredUp and Poshmark live side by side. And then put some real guardrails around ourselves so we're not cheating. We're not like doing this with an unfair advantage and we're actually helping 'Cause we're doing all the R&D, figuring out all the stuff, and then giving our sellers tools where they're interested to compete with us and hopefully overtake us eventually. We'll see. I think we have a pretty unique thesis on this, but like, that's the way we believe like our market could play out. So that's what we're, we're trying.
