Poshmark’s celebration of Earth Month is shining a light on its success in livestream shopping.
This month the generally peer-to-peer apparel resale platform will host a series of live shopping events that will bring sustainably minded brands directly into the mix.
Rothy’s will cohost a show alongside a Poshmark seller, while regenerative style leader Christy Dawn will host shows that focus solely on goods from Poshmark sellers. Additionally, Pact, Wolven, Cleobella, Whimsy + Row and Aday will auction off exclusive and sample merchandise on their own shows.
Poshmark will give 10 percent of the net gross merchandise value from the shows to Veritree, supporting the group’s tree-planting projects.
In addition to highlighting the eco virtues of resale and brands at the forefront of sustainability, the initiative offers a glimpse of just how livestreaming can work in the U.S.
Livestream shopping became a consumer phenomenon in China that, according to Statista, raked in sales of 4.92 trillion yuan, or $680 billion, last year.
Despite repeated efforts from a host of players, the format has never really taken off the same way in the U.S. But that could be changing now. Statista found that U.S. livestreaming sales grew 150 percent to $50 billion last year.
Poshmark is part of that rush.
The platform invited some of its best sellers to start livestreaming in April last year and now hosts tens of thousands of Posh Show sessions a month. Since the platform started to first test the format late in 2022, shoppers have watched more than 1 billion minutes of Posh Shows, turning in for more than 1,902 years altogether.
Steven Tristan Young, Poshmark’s chief marketing officer, said livestreaming has become a “gangbusters” way for sellers to engage with their community of shoppers.
Young said Poshmark is succeeding where others have failed because the sellers on its livestreams already have big audiences and are just connecting with them in a new and more personal way that also brings a new kind of entertainment value.
The Earth Month shows will be hosted from an @poshshows closet, but will be emceed by someone from the partner brand.
Livestreaming might also just be an idea in sync with the times as people who might have been camera shy before have become more acclimated to showing up on the small screen in the age of Zoom calls.
“Live selling has always had these big glitzy ideas around, ‘Oh, it has to be a celebrity,’” Young said. “‘Oh, it has to be a major influencer.’ But for us, we found the everyday sort of seller on Poshmark actually has a really strong following and people want to hear from them and people are on these shows for 30, 40 minutes a day.”
Now Poshmark is letting sustainable brands — and Mother Earth — in on the action.
“Some brands have more followers on Poshmark than they do on their own Instagram handle or their own TikTok handles,” Young said. “How do we give them more of a voice? The hard part is that it’s a balance. We want to give our sellers a voice. So this is a great example where we’re giving the brands a voice, but it’s not just them.”
Jamie Gersch, chief marketing officer of Rothy’s, said in a statement: “Rothy’s is excited to join forces with Poshmark this Earth Month to celebrate and reward a passionate resale community for extending the life of their Rothy’s, which are not only crafted from recycled plastic bottles, but also remarkably durable. Together, Rothy’s and Poshmark are modeling a more circular future for fashion, where brands encourage customers to keep their closets in circulation, and give their items another life through resale.”
