In an interview with WWD, Vestiaire Collective CEO Max Bittner talks about getting the company to profitability and growing in the United States.
“I think we will approach profitability in the next 12 months,” Bittner said. “It takes a long time, depending on how fast you’re trying to get there. It’s important to remind people that e-commerce is very much about attaining economies of scale. It’s very different from offline retail, where you launch one store, it can be profitable, and then you launch the next one. In e-commerce, the platform needs to work from Day One, and the platform is not just the website.
WWD: What about consumers shifting their discretionary dollars away from goods to more travel, dining out and other experiences?: That’s been the narrative over the last 12 to 18 months, and it’s starting to change. We’ve seen a post-COVID bounce back of travel and experience. People were starved of those during COVID-19. The pendulum swung too far into that space in 2022 and 2023. Now we are seeing a normalization.
: It’s roughly a quarter. I think we can get to 35, 40 percent of our business being the U.S. in the next three to five years.: We have invested in the U.S. organization. Many of the team members have joined within the last four months. We’re at 50 members, and I would say 30 before. The team is largely around marketing, PR and the consumer-facing components building the business. We have a logistics team in Industry City in Brooklyn. That team grows as the business grows.
: I ensure that Paris, our European headquarters, thinks U.S. business first. That’s really what I bring to the table.…The U.S. market is the hardest consumer market in the world. The U.S. consumer is the most demanding. You need to be at the top of your game to make the U.S. consumer happy. And that is very hard to do remotely, any one of my employees sitting in Paris. It also allows me to interact with U.S. consumers in a different frequency.
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