Maria Raga on why community is central to Depop’s success

The Business of Fashion Podcast

The Business of Fashion

Fashion & Beauty, Business, Arts

4.6 • 770 Ratings

🗓️ 26 November 2021

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The CEO of the online peer-to-peer marketplace believes the platform’s ability to connect people sets it apart from typical fashion e-commerce.

In June 2021, online marketplace Etsy announced plans to acquire Depop for $1.6 billion. The move was yet another sign of growing interest in the burgeoning fashion resale market, which according to BoF Insights, is now worth $130 billion globally.

CEO Maria Raga describes Depop as “combining elements from Instagram and eBay”. The platform is skewed towards lower-priced product exchange between younger traders, almost all of them 26 and under. Raga believes that it’s Depop’s community aspect — facilitating not just online transactions, but also person to person interactions — that attracts these all-important Gen-Z shoppers.

Raga’s insights are featured in the fifth episode of The BoF Show, now streaming on Bloomberg Quicktake.

Watch the fifth episode of The BoF Show here.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, this is Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Business of Fashion.
0:05.6	Welcome to the Bof podcast. It's Friday, November 26th. In June 2021, the online marketplace
0:12.6	Etsy announced its plans to acquire D-pop for $1.6 billion. The move was yet another sign of
0:19.6	the growing interest in the burgeoning fashion
0:21.7	resale market, which, according to B.OF Insights, is now worth more than $130 billion globally.
0:28.4	In the latest episode of the BOF show, Deepop's CEO Maria Raga, explains why she believed that
0:34.7	it's Deepop's community aspect, facilitating not just online transactions,
0:39.9	but also person-to-person interactions,
0:42.7	is essential for engaging with Gen Z shoppers.
0:45.9	To watch episode 5 on resale,
0:48.5	please find the link in our episode notes.
0:50.8	In the meantime, here's my full interview with Maria Raga,
0:55.6	exclusively on the BOF podcast. For Gen Z, this is like a really well-known, cool fashion technology community company,
1:04.8	but a lot of people in other generations have never heard of Deepop. So how would you explain it
1:08.8	to someone who had no idea what Deepop was?
1:11.1	The way we explain it is in very simple terms, it's a marketplace for people to come and buy and sell fashion.
1:18.6	Yeah.
1:19.6	It is true that we have a unique approach to it, so we're very much a community-first business,
1:23.6	which means that we allow our users to not just come to buy and sell, but to engage
1:28.6	with one another, get inspired, support each other. And as a result, amazing things happen.
1:34.1	You see some of our users becoming big brands, big influencers. You have users that get to
1:40.7	know each other through Deepop and end up doing amazing things.
	...

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