Bolingbrook’s
— an online consignment store for pre-owned items — is keeping busy this holiday season, shipping everything from lightly worn kid’s jackets and sweaters to used toys and books to shoppers across the nation.
But unlike many retailers, their sense of hustle wasn’t reserved for the holidays. Thanks to high demand, the team at Swap has been hard at work all year long — and it’s led to a year of marked growth.
“We’re now in scaling mode,” said Swap’s CEO Juha Koponen.
In the past year, Swap’s team ballooned from 30 to 150 — and they’re still hiring at a rate most startups never experience. Koponen said they’re immediately hiring for over 80 positions.
The majority of those hires are to help staff the company’s new fulfillment center — a 360,000 square foot facility the company moved to in September to help process their ever growing inventory. Customers can send in boxes of their lightly used stuff — children’s and women’s clothes, toys, and other items — and set their own prices using a vendor dashboard.
Users are also welcome to swap items at no cost.
Swap’s funding status has also seen expansion. In the past year, the company raised $10 million in funding — about $6 million of which came out of Finland-based Cleantech Invest.
Launched in 2013, Swap already has 150,000 customers and expects to hit $50 million in revenue by the end of 2016.
“We’ve grown pretty fast, but we’ve also been growing our inventory,” Koponen said, who added that Swap offers about 560,000 items on its platform. “We are the ones who offer this for everyone in America. Some of our peers want to go for high-end customers, but we want to serve everybody. And I think we’ve actually been pretty successful.”
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