Queenly - Find Your Dream Dress

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Company & Team Introduction

Queenly is the world's largest online marketplace for formal attire. The company was founded in 2019 by Trisha Bantigue and Kathy Zhou-Patel. The idea for Queenly came from Banigue’s own personal experiences in the world of pageantry. After immigrating to the US after a difficult life growing up in the Philippines, Banigue started competing in pageants to win scholarships and prize money that could be put towards her education. Once she started competing, she quickly began realizing the many faults of the industry. Prices were absurd, options were limited, and dresses would only be worn once before returning to the closet, never to be seen again. The scholarships and prize money from the pageants enabled Banigue to attend UC Berkeley before securing positions at top technology companies like Meta and Uber. Banigue, still aware of the many inefficiencies of the formal clothing market, decided to team up with technical co-founder Kathy Zhou-Patel, a UPenn graduate and experienced software engineer, after a nearly 5-year tenure at Pinterest and Venmo. Queenly is headquartered in San Francisco, California and has grown its team to ~19 people.

Product Overview

Queenly is the leading marketplace for buying and selling formal wear online. The company’s platform gives buyers an unmatched selection, affordable pricing, and sustainability. Unlike any other competitor in the market, the company offers various differentiated services for Queenly users. Services include the ability to make offers, authentication/quality assurance, dry cleaning services, and proper packaging and shipping procedures to improve the buyer experience and reduce the risks of a damaged/imperfect product. After initially being just a resale platform, the company has expanded into offering new dresses from its network of small business partners such as Marvellous Dresses, Just Girls Store, and Trudy’s Store. Queenly is also increasing the number of verticals they cover on the platform, most recently moving into bridal wear while expanding geographically as they move into the Canadian market.

Total Addressable Market

Queenly’s total addressable market is nothing short of massive. The global formal wear industry is estimated to be as large as 100B. In addition to the size of the market, it is also one that has largely remained offline. So many dresses are bought for massive sums of money only to be worn once before sitting in a closet for years, as finding a buyer is difficult. Bringing the industry online widens the potential buyer pool to a global scale, rather than just those in close proximity to a specific physical location.

Business Model & The Numbers

Queenly utilizes a simple transaction-based business model where they take a 20% fee for all items sold on the platform. This aligns Queenly’s incentives with their customers, only making money when their customers do as well. Resale remains around 75% of all items sold through the platform, with another 15% from small business partners and 10% from designers. Queenly has over 200,000 dress listings on its platform, a scope of selection unmatched by any competitor, whether online or brick-and-mortar. Since 2020, the company’s customer count has grown 35x, and the company’s sales have increased over 3x.

Traction

Early traction for Queenly since the pandemic has been incredible, with over 1 million users already buying and selling on the platform. The company has inked massive partnerships with some of the biggest brands in the world, including Miss USA and Netflix, to create a formal event called “Queens Ball: A Bridgerton Experience” based on the success of the Netflix series Bridgerton in which eventgoers will have a 15% discount code to purchase a dress on the Queenly platform. Queenly also recently expanded beyond its US roots to the Canadian market and signed a massive partnership with Miss Universe Canada, the most notable pageant organization in the country. Queenly also has over 700k downloads between their apps on the Google Play Store and App Store and has signed over 40 dress partners, including Terani, Portia & Scarlett, and Mac Duggal.

Competitors

The competitive landscape for Queenly is quite favourable. The company is the dominant player in the formal wear resale market, with most competition stemming from larger platforms that don’t adequately serve the industry's requirements. Here are the company’s top competitors:

Facebook Marketplace - The Facebook Marketplace is home to a lot of buying and selling used clothes and is effective for small-scale, low-cost items like t-shirts and pants as you can tap into Facebook’s massive base of over 2B users. But there are problems as well, one being that Facebook’s platform tends to have a larger range of item quality with no quality assurance, no value-added services, sellers that will only sell the product when meeting in person, and uninformative and poorly written listings. Selling dresses is the furthest thing from a priority for Facebook.

Poshmark - Poshmark is the leading style reselling platform in the world, with a long history dating back to 2011. The platform has over 200M items listed and 80M registered users worldwide. Poshmark covers various items catering to men, women, pets, and even home decor. Poshmark’s platform faces many of the same problems that plague Facebook’s Marketplace, such as missing critical listing information and lack of quality control. Poshmark went public on the NASDAQ in 2021 with an impressive revenue base of ~350M before being acquired by Japanese Technology firm Naver for 1.2B in Q2 2022.

Funding

Queenly has raised three rounds of funding and is backed by an impressive list of investors. Queenly’s first raise was an 800k pre-seed round in 2019 led by The House Fund with participation from firms like Dragon Capital as well as notable angels, including Thuan Pham (ex-CTO of Uber) and Shayna Modarresi (SVP of Bridge Bank). This gave Queenly around a year of runway to build out the product and find a fit within their market. In 2021, the company saw a strong boost in investor appetite after being accepted into YCombinator, where they received an additional 125k SAFE investment from YC. With the newfound investor interest post-YC, Queenly tapped the venture capital markets again in 2021, initially raising a 2.3M seed round before extending the round months later to a total of 6.3M, with Connie Chan from A16Z leading the round, follow on investments from Dragon Capital, and new participants including Brightlane Ventures with the funds being used to scale their headcount. The company is tapping the capital markets again, this time via crowdfunding on Wefunder. Check out their filings/financials; you have an opportunity to invest! https://wefunder.com/queenly.