‘TikTok meets Depop’ is the shorthand description for Teleport, a US-based social commerce marketplace that allows consumers to discover, sell, and thrift circular fashion.

The interactive resale platform was founded by former banking analyst and product engineer Jon Choi, a self-described thrift lover who was fed up with the current state of e-commerce. 

Compared to his memories of shopping in brick-and-mortar stores in South Korea where he grew up, shopping online felt like looking at “a boring magazine catalog of squares,” Choi said. He wanted to build a product that would recreate the “warm and fuzzy” feeling of shopping with friends in a digital format. 

After asking himself the simple yet powerful question, “Why does shopping online not feel like shopping in person?”, the former Dropbox executive took matters into his own hands and launched Teleport in 2019. 

What is Teleport?

The platform was initially designed as a content hub for thrifting.

Like TikTok, Teleport users can scroll through a feed of videos that feature a mix of outfit-of-the-day (OOTD) content and clips of users suggesting how to style thrifted items. Teleport users can also direct-message one another, comment on each other’s posts and connect over a shared love for thrifting. 

Re-commerce capabilities were added in 2023, largely thanks to the direction of Teleport’s co-founder and chief executive officer Danielle Vermeer.

Sellers can now upload a video and tag six items back to their Teleport “closet” to sell. In comparison to TikTok, Teleport is more focused on the style and personality of the sellers themselves, rather than focusing only on products they are trying to sell.

Vermeer explained that Teleport is “driven by organic growth on the seller side.”

Sellers can “show their style in a way that people actually want to shop, which is being able to buy items to fit into their wardrobe and their actual outfits,” she said. “No one wants to just buy an item and then not know how to actually put it together in an outfit.”

For example, she said, a consumer may not be interested in an “ugly grandma sweater”, but if they see it on a seller, who also shares tips on how to style that item, they may be more likely to purchase it and continue buying from Teleport.

Vermeer told Inside Retail that the company has retention rates up to 80-90 per cent. 

Since the company’s launch, Vermeer noted that Teleport has garnered “tens of thousands of buyers and sellers” with over 100,00 products listed on the marketplace. 

Amazon exec turned startup co-founder 

Before joining Teleport in January 2023, Vermeer was leading the re-commerce charge at Amazon as product lead of the company’s resale and circular fashion division. 

While Amazon isn’t necessarily known as a leader in the re-commerce space, Vermeer saw potential for growth when she was working in the company’s Luxury Stores division, which launched in 2020 to provide a more elevated shopping experience for consumers interested in shopping for designer brands like Louis Vuitton and Gucci.

As the senior product manager, Vermeer helped flesh out the luxury resale team and build up the online retailer’s re-commerce abilities. 

A longtime sustainable fashion lover, Vermeer explained that her most recent position at Amazon had, in many ways, been her “dream job” and helped her reach some of her “North Star” goals in creating a more sustainably-focused world.

This makes it especially noteworthy that she was willing to leave, in her words, a “secure, high-paying job in big tech” to join a startup. While Teleport wasn’t the first company to approach Vermeer, it was the only one that fully captured her attention, she said. 

In an era when consumers are craving interactive shopping experiences, Teleport sets itself apart by combining a love of fashion, sustainability and more humanised form of engagement in a single platform. 

“With Teleport, you can really get to know the seller and the buyer, because you see them in a video, which is a richer medium and helps buyers feel more confident in making that purchase,” Vermeer enthused.

“Because if you can see how an item fits and how it is styled on a real person, you just feel more confident that it will be [the right purchase] for you.”

The shifting state of the re-commerce market

It’s no secret that the resale apparel market is booming right now. 

As reported by German research and analytics platform Statista, in 2023, the global market value of secondhand and resale apparel was estimated to be worth US$197 billion. This is projected to rise rapidly in the coming years, increasing by roughly US$100 billion by 2026. 

As the market grows, competition is increasing, both from established players like eBay and Vestiare Collective as well as newer ones like Depop and Teleport. 

As Vermeer and Choi pointed out, consumers don’t just want to buy products anymore, but they want engaging and interactive shopping experiences that bring the joy of shopping IRL online. 

Another company embracing this trend is ThredUp, which is beta testing a peer-to-peer resale marketplace. 

The peer-to-peer format marks a major shift for ThredUp, which up to now has stocked and sold secondhand clothing.  

With this new model, ThredUp will function more like Poshmark where will sellers take photos of the items they want to sell and upload all the details, including size, price and brand, to the platform.

According to ThredUp’s website, the item will remain listed until it sells. Once an item is sold and shipped out with a prepaid shipping label, sellers can either earn store credit at ThredUp or cash out. 

Similar to Teleport, which does not have selling fees and only charges a buyer’s fee of US$1.89 per purchase, ThredUp’s new marketplace will not have any selling fees, at least for now.