Two years ago, Julia O’Mara and Brian McMahon relaunched the social app they founded, Pickle, turning it from a platform for crowdsourcing clothing recommendations into a peer-to-peer rental service
At the time, it was a gamble. But McMahon and O’Mara said the move has paid off. Influencers like Remi Bader and Serena Kerrigan have become organic users and evangelists for the app, and Danielle Bernstein will be renting out her clothes via Pickle starting this weekend. Monthly active users have tripled in the last year — the team declined to share exact figures but said its user count is “well into the tens of thousands.” Plus, there are thousands of rentals each week and over 100,000 items available at any one time. Most notably, and indicative of Pickle’s hyperlocal New York City focus, one in four Manhattan-based women ages 18-35 is a Pickle user, according to. the company. Pickle recently launched in Los Angeles and is scouting opportunities in other major metro areas, like Chicago and Miami.
On Sunday, to kick off Bernstein’s entry onto the app, Pickle will host an open closet event where over 1,000 pieces from her closet are for sale at its store on 8th Avenue, followed by her full 100+ piece rental closet dropping online on Monday. O’Mara said 1,100 people had RSVP’d as of Thursday.
This is emblematic of the strategy Pickle has used to grow, O’Mara said. It does not pay influencers to use the app and has spent little on social ads. But when big-name influencers do show an interest, Pickle reaches out and helps them get set up. Eighty percent of the company’s growth has been organic, O’Mara said. Pickle has only about 12 full-time employees, but it’s actively expanding its marketing and product engineering teams. In October 2023, Pickle raised its first funding round, of $8 million from FirstMark Capital, Craft Ventures and Burst Capital. The plan is to fundraise again next year.
“Our spend on paid aids is very low,” McMahon said. “A lot of [our customer acquisition] is community-driven. Our marketing includes newsletters and notifications about trending items, for example.”
One of Pickle’s selling points has been providing a way for stylish women to make money off their fashion sense without necessarily being influencers. Increasingly, it’s been hard to have a side gig in fashion that doesn’t require a savvy social media presence. Pickle only takes a 20% cut of each transaction. McMahon said Pickle could, and someday might, raise that percentage, but for now it’s an attractively low fee for lenders. Pickle is hands-off with the product. It’s up to renters to pay for a courier or shipping service to pick up the clothes, and lenders handle cleaning.
While having big names like Bernstein helps with awareness and bringing in new users, influencer closets make up less than 2% of Pickle’s sales. “The two best-performing lenders, both making over $40,000 per year on the app, are not influencers. A lot of our lenders are just stylish women with great closets.”
McMahon said peer-to-peer rental has an obvious value proposition for both renters and lenders. Renters get access to high-end pieces for an average of 10% of the retail price, while the lenders can lend out the same piece of clothing 20 or more times. With the rise of resale, customers now buy clothes safe in the knowledge that they can resell them at a later date to make up to 80-100% of their value back. But with peer-to-peer rental, they can make back up to 200% or more of the value of the clothing.
There is an option to sell a piece of clothing to a renter, but McMahon said this isn’t a significant source of revenue and not something Pickle has put much investment in. Often, lenders don’t want to sell even if the renter is interested for the same reason: They can make more money off an item by renting it out 20 times than they could by selling it once.
