How Mobile App Poshmark Created an Army of Feverish Fans

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Menlo Park-based Poshmark, a mobile app where you can buy and sell those once-loved fashions languishing in your closet, is, as they say, on fire. Just this week they announced a $12 million influx of investor funding, and in their first year in business they've gone from facilitating about 50 sales per week to 350,000 sales. Which means they'll need that money for infrastructure to keep their users as happy as the ones in the video below. It also means they were on the right track from the get-go—a rarity for a startup.

"What has surprised me is the fact that we haven't had to change our direction one bit," Poshmark co-founder Manish Chandra told Racked. "It's surprising and exciting and at the same time more confirmation in our journey."

Chandra's journey in the world of fashion-centric startups started in 2007 when he co-founded Kaboodle. Now, with co-founder Tracy Sun and a fast-growing team of crack engineers and and style bloggers turned marketing mavens, Poshmark is becoming the Instagram of online buying and selling. Because it's way more than buying and selling, it's a passionate network of fashion fanatics who really freaking love this app (again, see video). Users hang out an average of 25 minutes per day, selling $100 million in goods per year as a result of 2 million interactions per month.

Poshmark's secret weapons are "Posh Parties," which are virtual gatherings of buyers and sellers along a theme at a specified time. For example, there's a Chanel, Burberry, Prada and Chloe party happening tomorrow at 9am. Some Posh Parties also happen live and in person—the team traveled around the country post-launch last year and hosted parties with local style bloggers. Now the trick will be to attract a wider population beyond fashion insiders, which Chandra said is already starting to happen. "In Miami at our party there was a librarian, a clinical researcher, a PhD student..."

Stay tuned for an iPad and Android versions in the new year, as well as more functionality on their website.
· Poshmark [Official Site]
· Posmark mobile fashion app raised $12M series B [Forbes]
· Fashion + Tech snaps [Racked SF]