Poshmark CEO and co-founder Manish Chandra: "In the first six months I answered every single #customerservice inquiry myself and I still have a direct line to the customers who can contact me... Sometimes I'll find that the site has a problem because some customer contacted me through Instagram, through text messages, through email, through something before my team sometimes knows it, and that, I think, is just the ability to keep connected. And when you start to feel very disconnected from your #customer, that's probably time for you to get somebody else to do your job." #entrepreneurship #startup #founder #sales #community #poshmark #ecommerce
When Manish Chandra and his co-founders set out to build Poshmark in 2011, they shared a vision to reinvent how people buy and sell fashion: "it's going to be social, it's going to be something anyone can use, and it's going to be mobile." Faced with the task of recalibrating consumer behavior to embrace mobile-first shopping and selling, Poshmark's founders identified a solution: in-person events. "Posh Parties" gathered fashion lovers and aspiring resellers across the country to take photos, create listings, and make sales IRL — helping to educate consumers about this new way to shop and sell, provide a touchpoint for early customer feedback, and serve as proof of concept for investors. Over a decade later, in-person events remain a critical part of Poshmark's success: providing a space for Poshmark's community of 130M+ people to come together and learn from one another. Listen to Manish's episode on Mayfield Fund's Fund/Build/Scale podcast, hosted by Walter Thompson, to learn more about the story behind Poshmark and our community, with advice for aspiring entrepreneurs along the way.
