Thelist

THE LIST is a luxury fashion marketplace that aggregates inventory from boutiques, brands and retailers worldwide and sells it directly to consumers, with fulfilment handled centrally including insurance, taxes and duties and store-to-door express delivery to 190 countries. Consumers can browse and buy current collections across fashion, watches, jewellery and home categories, request sourcing of hard-to-find items, and receive orders from multiple partner boutiques. The company positions itself as a social commerce platform: shoppers can follow brands and stores, view personalised content, and use live streaming and live chat to communicate directly with in-store sales associates or personal shoppers. Partner boutiques set up their own digital storefronts and control how their brands and products are presented, while THE LIST manages the transaction and logistics layer.

The platform is powered by an in-house AI-based API called GENESYS, which the founder describes as transforming in-store retail products into catalogue listings in real time by mapping ERP data, extracting attributes and enriching data from images to generate dozens of descriptive data points per item (for example heel height, material, exact colour and applicable seasons). The company states the model is 98.9% accurate, operates across hundreds of thousands of products in real time, and reduces catalogue production cost from as much as $80 per SKU to under 10 cents, which it characterises as roughly 810x cost efficiency versus traditional catalogue production. GENESYS is also sold to other retailers as a B2B product, with integration times described as single-digit days and no engineering cost on the retailer's side.

The consumer storefront offers brands including Balenciaga, Alexander McQueen, Burberry, Brunello Cucinelli, Ferragamo, Coperni, MM6 Maison Margiela, Isabel Marant, Y-3, Elisabetta Franchi and 7 For All Mankind, with items typically priced from around $150 to over $1,000. THE LIST guarantees all items are authentic and brand new, offers free worldwide shipping on orders over $300 and free 14-day returns with complimentary pick-up, and accepts Visa, MasterCard, American Express and bank wire transfer.

Founding story

THE LIST was founded by Andreas Skorski, who says he built the first ad scanner technology for print magazines in Germany at age 17 and has worked on startups since. Several of the company's data scientists previously worked at a competitor or at large global retail brands.

Business model

THE LIST operates a marketplace model: partner boutiques and brands list inventory and set their own prices, while THE LIST handles customer acquisition, the checkout transaction and the full fulfilment chain including insurance, taxes and duties and express delivery. Alongside the direct-to-consumer marketplace, the company runs a B2B platform business licensing its GENESYS AI catalogue-production API to other retailers.

Revenue comes from consumer sales transacted on the marketplace, where prices are set by each partner boutique, and from the platform/B2B side where the GENESYS API is provided to other retailers and major players in the industry.

Traction

The company reports that tens of thousands of customers have made purchases validating its AI, that GENESYS processes hundreds of thousands of products in real time and powers other major retailers, and that its first paying customer dates back several years. Retail metrics it tracks include gross merchandise value and customer and supplier stickiness.

Latest developments

As of a May 2024 founder interview, the company said it was pivoting, planning to scale its direct-to-consumer marketplace into additional markets while expanding the B2B platform business around the GENESYS API.