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Fleek connects 1,000+ suppliers and 200K SKUs with 10,000 retailers across 70 countries – the B2B layer thrift never had.
ENTRY ANGLES
AI assistant for discovering items across secondhand marketplaces · Vertical-specific secondhand platforms (electronics, cameras, furniture beyond apparel) · Demographic-targeted secondhand shopping experiences (Gen Z individuality, family budgeting, quality-conscious buyers)
VERTICALS
CAPABILITIES
AI/ML for item discovery and recommendations, Multi-marketplace aggregation technology, Understanding demographic shopping behaviors and motivations
Fleek built a marketplace for buying and selling secondhand clothing in wholesale quantities.
The platform connects over 1,000 suppliers offering more than 200,000 distinct SKUs with more than 10,000 retailers and distributors across 70 countries. Fleek's offices and distribution hubs are based in the UK, India, and Pakistan.
Fleek handles logistics in-house and offers buyers payment terms of up to 30 days from purchase.
All goods go through quality control and counterfeit screening before shipping. A buyer protection program provides refunds for defects the QC process misses.
Listed prices on the marketplace are effectively opening bids – the platform's rules explicitly allow buyers to make offers to sellers.
For that purpose, a video chat is built directly into the platform. A buyer can ask a seller to show the merchandise in closer detail, then negotiate on price in the same session.
During a video chat, sellers can also show products they haven't listed on the marketplace – which is fully permitted. Fleek charges its commission at the moment of shipment, so it doesn't matter how the deal was discovered.
Buyers who'd rather not browse can skip the catalog entirely and tell the platform's AI assistant what kind of merchandise they need. The assistant identifies suitable suppliers and connects the buyer with them for a direct video conversation. The result is less a traditional marketplace and more of an online wholesale bazaar – familiar in format to how trade works across South Asia.
Fleek went through Y Combinator in early 2022 and raised $5.6 million shortly after. Its new round of $14.8 million confirms the business has continued to grow.
Fleek's momentum comes from landing squarely at the intersection of two trends: wholesale and secondhand clothing.
The wholesale market is enormous. It reached $49 trillion in 2023, is expected to top $53 trillion this year, and is projected to reach $68 trillion by 2028.
A significant driver is entrepreneurial activity. People opening brick-and-mortar and online shops need product to sell – ideally interesting merchandise at prices that leave room for margin. That demand is fueling the rise of wholesale marketplaces.
One prominent example: Ghost ([covered here](/review/proshhe-vsego-zarabotat-samomu-esli-dat-vozmozhnost-zarabotat-drugim)), founded in 2021, which has raised $95 million – including $40 million in October. Ghost handles wholesale for new overstock: merchandise that's simply sitting in warehouses, available at a discount to free up capital and shelf space.
Max Retail ([covered here](/review/razmoroz-500-milliardov-ih-dollarov)) operates on a similar model and has raised $20.9 million, including $15 million this past April.
On the secondhand side: the global resale market for clothing is projected to reach $350 billion by 2028, growing three times faster than the overall apparel market.
This reflects a genuine shift in consumer behavior. Buying and wearing secondhand is no longer considered embarrassing. And this isn't a generational quirk – interest in secondhand is roughly equal across Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z.
You might expect secondhand to skew toward lower-income markets. The data says otherwise. The countries where the highest share of people bought at least one secondhand item in 2023 include the UK, US, France, and Germany – where 55–61% of the population made at least one secondhand purchase. Mexico, Brazil, Spain, and South Korea follow.
As demand for secondhand clothing grows, startups are racing to build the supply infrastructure to meet it.
Fleek is one of them. Though it's worth noting – given that Fleek's distribution hubs are in India and Pakistan – that some of what's sold on the platform may be factory overruns or deadstock from manufacturing facilities rather than true used garments. That's an open question.
Still, other startups are building more clearly traceable supply channels for secondhand goods.
Croissant ([covered here](/review/reshaem-staruju-problemu-no-vryvaemsja-na-novyj-rynok)) raised $24 million in its first round last summer. It works with online apparel retailers to embed a buyback offer at point of sale, giving customers a guaranteed resale price for the item within 12 months of purchase.
(Re)vive ([covered here](/review/kogda-rynok-bolshoj-nuzhna-pravilnaja-biznes-model)) is a project from Hemster, which previously offered brand-name clothing tailoring and alterations. The new venture offers retailers a turnkey service for returned merchandise – receiving, refurbishing, and reselling returned items through resale channels and secondhand stores – and raised $3.5 million in May.
The most successful startups emerge at the exact moment when "people didn't used to do this, and now they do." Everything old has been invented. But riding a behavioral shift gives you a real shot at building something new that can actually take off.
One of those shifts is happening right now: the normalization of buying and wearing secondhand. What was once a marker of poverty is now acceptable – even desirable – across a wide range of demographics, for different reasons:
- Gen Z (18–26) buys secondhand to express individuality. They'd rather wear an interesting or vintage brand piece than something new from a fast-fashion chain.
- Millennials (27–42) buy secondhand to dress their families well without overextending the budget.
- Gen X (43–58) has reached the age of caring about quality brands. But they'd rather buy a great label secondhand than pay full price for this season's new arrivals.
- Boomers (59+) buy secondhand for the hunt. Finding something interesting at a bargain price is genuinely fun.
The direction, then, is the secondhand market – including apparel, but not limited to it.
The space rewards creative thinking, including with technology. A [recent review](/review/kak-zahvatit-75-rynka-onlajn-prodazh) covered Encore, currently in Y Combinator, which built an AI assistant for discovering interesting items across secondhand marketplaces spanning clothing, electronics, cameras, furniture, and more.
Which part of the secondhand market would you want to go after?