Fashionphile’s Founder Sarah Davis Spills ALL
If you love shopping luxury vintage, and handbags in particular, we're willing to bet you know all about Fashionphile.
Fashionphile is the place to not only shop for luxury, pre-owned items, but also to sell! We just had to learn more, and the founder of Fashionphile, Sarah Davis, was kind enough to invite us to her showroom in Carlsbad, California, where she took us on a tour and answered all of our most burning questions. Check out the interview, below.
Sweety High: Can you tell us about your process for treating bags?
Sarah Davis: Every item goes through our spa treatment which is just a basic cleanout. For most, if you look at the products, they're in really great shape.
SH: What's the craziest thing someone has accidentally left in a bag that they sold to you?
SD: We get all kinds of crazy interesting things that people leave inside their bags. We had somebody leave $8,000 in a bag!
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SH: Who typically sells to you?
SD: 85 to 90% of our products come from people who are at home and snap a photo of their Gucci backpack, for example. Our team looks at it and says, alright, we'll give you $1,000. If you think it's a fair price, you use a free shipping label that we send you, and you can stick it on an old box you have lying around.
We looked at potentially doing a cleanout kit where we send you packaging, and then we were like, we love this, when we talk about circularity, which is very important for many of our customers and is why they're turning to us, the fact that they're reusing an old box we just think is so fitting. We encourage people to reuse their own boxes.
SH: When do sellers get paid?
SD: As soon as our authenticators authenticate what you send us, you get paid. You can request a wire, a check, Neiman Marcus store credit (plus 10%) or Fashionphile store credit (and you'll get 10% more if you take store credit).
The more we can pay you, the more you're going to buy, and then you're going to sell more to us later! We like that virtuous cycle.
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SH: Can you tell us about how much you pay the customer, vs. how much you get at the end of the day?
SD: On average, across the board, it's about a 70-30% ratio where you keep 70% as the seller and we keep 30%. That percentage gets a lot larger on your side and smaller on our side the higher the price of the product is. For example, we're not going to keep 30% of a new Birkin, it will be much less. You might keep somewhere like 90% of what we end up selling it for. And if you end up getting 10% in-store credit, you can see a lot more movement in your closet.
SH: When will you not accept an item?
SD: There are certain products that just don't keep their resale value, like Marc Jacobs sunglasses. So we just don't get into that. That being said, it's not necessarily the price point, because we will buy things that will sell for just $100, like an Hermes scarf. The price point isn't that high, but the value is considering it's a tiny little piece of silk. We think to ourselves, would the ultra-luxury customer want this in her closet? If she does, we'll accept it.
SH: Can you tell us a fun fact about your showroom?
SD: Our lego Birkin is made up of 58,000 legos!
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SH: What makes Fashionphile so special?
SD: One of our values at Fashionphile is that every item is someone's holy grail. That's why each department treats it that way—like every item is someone's holy grail. The products we sell are special.
You just really don't see this type of selection in any type of resale. From vintage to items that have been discontinued to something that was released last season, we have it all. It's so cool to see the variety. I'm up to my eyeballs in pieces but always see something special I've never seen before.
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