Inc. magazine recently revealed that ShopWorn has landed on its annual Inc. 5,000 list, a tribute to the nation's fastest-growing private companies.
ShopWorn is an ecommerce platform that sells authentic, unused luxury products at discounted prices. In a press release, ShopWorn CEO Larry Birnbaum said that 2020 brought Shopworn the fastest growth in history.
In an interview with Globe Banner, Birnbaum revealed that the company grew from roughly $12 million in sales in 2020 to projecting just over $20 million for 2021. The company's co-founder credited his workers for ShopWorn's success.
"We owe it all to all our team," Birnbaum told Globe Banner. "We have an incredible team that believes in our vision and everybody works toward one goal and that is having a very happy customer. We really take our customers' experience into account and we try to have an incredible user experience, and we believe that doing things the right way is going to get us to where we want to go."
Birnbaum highlighted two key differences between ShopWorn and other luxury goods ecommerce retailers – authenticity and sustainability.
"We have two sources of purchasing goods, and that is the brand or their authorized retailers," he said. "So we don't need to have one authenticator on staff, let alone hundreds like many other companies out there today. To shop with confidence is definitely a huge benefit to the consumer."
The company achieves its goal of sustainability by purchasing goods from luxury brand companies that are unable to move its entire stock of product and sells those products at a discount when they might have otherwise been destroyed or gone to waste.
"The luxury cycle, whether it's a watch, piece of jewelry or a leather handbag, there's no reason that it has to go die a horrible death when it can be loved by someone who may not be able to pay full price, but can afford to buy it at a little bit of a discount," Birnbaum said. "And we become an ambassador for the brand because maybe 70% of our buyers are first-time buyers of those brands and once they buy something, if they love it, as they progress in their life and as they become more affluent, they will become full-price buyers for those brands."
Birnbaum says that ShopWorn's sales saw explosive numbers in China starting in March 2020, so the company has hired a team in Hong Kong to translate the website into Mandarin and has begun work to get the new site working behind China's national firewall. The company has also taken steps to increase its presence in other countries in the Pan-Asia region including Korea, Singapore and Taiwan.
Headquartered in Cresskill, New Jersey, ShopWorn was established in 2015 by Larry and Richard Birnbaum, according to the company's Wikipedia page.