I’d be interested in reading about how Depop did what dozens of other startups have tried to do: build a giant business around the used clothes market.
In both platforms there is influencer-heavy marketing. Many fashion influencers(i really dislike this term, but it is the nomenclature) sell clothes that they wore very little in Instagram advertisements. This is a great business model for them, people follow them more tightly because they are actually able to buy for (mostly) affordable prices some of the clothes they see in pictures and they also get some additional under-the-radar cash.
[1] : https://www.vinted.com/
“But the real secret to Depop’s success is that it allows users to amass two of the most valuable modern currencies: money and clout. Becoming a top seller on Depop is a springboard to fame on YouTube or Instagram. It also provides built-in monetization for a future career as an influencer.”
It is a very marketing-heavy operation, as the platform itself doesn’t offer that great of a deal to sellers - they charge a 10% commission plus payment processing fees (PayPal takes 2%, though now I believe there’s an option to use a different processor), so high-volume sellers are unlikely to use it. I wouldn’t be surprised if up until this day they were spending more on marketing that they would’ve made back from most customers.
The business itself is quite low-margin (support & fraud/scams cuts into that), has decent competition (Mercari, StockX) and can be trivially replicated by the likes of Facebook (Depop is basically an Instagram but where you can buy & sell - something FB can trivially replicate if they wanted to).
It makes sense for Etsy to buy it for access to the userbase and to integrate it into their existing business, but as a stand-alone business it's not that great IMO because of the aforementioned points.
I think there are problems with making Instagram seem tacky by clobbering on a marketplace. It would make it look cheap and shilly. Right now it’s the most rarified space to share pictures of your awesome lifestyle. I think you can either have that very cool, chic vibe or the amazon marketplace vibe.
I think that despite their enormous resources, there are places that brands can’t go.
I don't think that would be fair and that it is 100% likely there was a great deal of deliberate strategy involved as well.
This is a very marketing-heavy operation that I don't think could stand on its own and be sustainable, and so the only possible outcome is to stay afloat long enough (by reinvesting a significant chunk of revenue into more marketing) to get gobbled up by a bigger fish.
They had the right investors that believed in it and bankrolled it for long enough and it paid off, but it's ultimately still a stroke of luck IMO.
There was a bit of luck in getting their initial traction (they were definitely not prepared for the growth spurt and spent years getting to the point that the backend wasn't just falling over constantly), but they executed really well on capturing their core market.