ThredUp's business starts with a bag. Sellers order a Clean Out Kit, fill it with clothes they no longer want, and mail it back with a prepaid label. ThredUp sorts, photographs, prices, and lists what it can sell. By the end of 2020 the Oakland company had processed over 100 million secondhand items from 35,000 brands. It filed to go public in early 2021, pitching resale as a cheaper way to dress and a fix for fashion's waste.

Closets Full of Inventory

James Reinhart, Chris Homer, and Oliver Lubin started ThredUp in 2009. Reinhart, its CEO, had earlier co-founded a network of charter schools. The bet was that most closets hold clothes nobody wears, and that sorting them at scale could turn them into a store. Buyers saved up to 90 percent off estimated retail prices. In 2018 ThredUp began running resale programs for brands and retailers too.

Fourteen Dollars a Share

ThredUp priced its IPO at $14 a share in March 2021 and listed on Nasdaq as TDUP. At the end of 2020 it had 1.24 million active buyers and 428,000 active sellers. In 2020 it processed just over one million Clean Out bags. It estimated that the clothing Americans throw away each year could fill about one billion of those bags. ThredUp still trades on Nasdaq as TDUP.

Cover: Laundresses Carrying Back Their Work, Théophile-Alexandre Pierre Steinlen. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for laundresses carrying clothes (garments on the move).