Poshmark Ends 2020 With 6.5 Million Active Buyers – Q4 and Full Year Earnings Call Highlights

Poshmark released its first earnings report since going public earlier this year. This report covers the company’s fourth-quarter and full-year 2020. In Q4, Poshmark’s gross merchandise value (GMV) increased 28% Year over Year to $387.2 million, ending the year with 6.5 million active buyers.

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• GMV was $1.4 billion, an increase of 29% year-over-year from $1.1 billion in 2019. GMV has increased year-over-year for nine years, since the company’s founding in 2011.
• Trailing 12 months, Active Buyers reached 6.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2020, a 20% year-over-year increase from 5.4 million from the fourth quarter of 2019.
• Net revenue was $262.1 million, a 28% increase year-over-year from $205.2 million in 2019.

Here are curated highlights from Poshmark’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Thursday night. All bullet points are direct quotes. Editorial clarifications are noted in brackets.

Comments from Poshmark Founder, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer Manish Chandra

• We not only navigated through a very challenging year, we also delivered profitability for the first time and accelerated momentum in the business.
• Our mission is to put people at the heart of commerce, empowering everyone to try. By pairing technology with people’s inherent desire to socialize, we built a vibrant social marketplace engineered to enable seamless e-commerce transactions and create hyper-engagement.
• Our social marketplace is designed to serve everyone, whether you’re looking to save money, make money, find unique items or discover new brands. Users come to Poshmark to shop and sell everything from apparel accessories and beauty to home goods luxury items and now pets merchandise.
• We’re the leader of the interception of three key trends shaping the future of shopping; the shift to online, a shift to social and the shift to secondhand. Many of these trends are led by younger generations who continue to grow their spending power as they age.
• We grow our marketplace by growing our overall community of users. These users activate as buyers and sellers creating a virtual flywheel of growth and monetizations. When users join, they connect with each other through social interactions, which grew 48% to 30.4 billion in 2020.
• Sellers are at the heart of the Poshmark community and we welcome sellers of all types, from resellers to retailers, side hustlers to professional sellers.
• The beauty of our social marketplace is that our users who spend an average 27 minutes daily on our app continue to engage and reengage over time both as buyers and as sellers.
• Just last month, we began testing a highly requested capability that allows sellers to add videos directly into their listings providing new ways to market their products, drive traffic to their closets, and engage with potential buyers. These listing videos will automatically be added on to Posh Stories continuing our goal to bring video into the heart of Poshmark social marketplace.
• Growing our international footprint and capability is a second key strategic focus and we plan to invest ahead of revenue. The success of our Canadian market which launched in May 2019 provides a roadmap for continued international expansion.
• In 2020, we launched two new categories; Beauty & Wellness and Toys & Games. And just a few weeks ago, we launched Pets. As we think about category expansion we want to address the style needs of the entire family. These new offerings demonstrate the scalability of our model.
• In September, we released Drops Soon feature, which allowed sellers to premarket items that are not yet available for purchase. Buyers can like the items to be notified when it’s available for sale, building demand prior to the product drop and facilitating quicker sell-through. This feature has been particularly well received by professional resellers, brands, and boutiques who are managing deep inventory.
• We’re in the early stages of investing in new technology and services to help our sellers, spend time doing what they love best, which is connecting with each other and serving their customers. And this includes building out capabilities for sellers who are scaling up their operations.
• In January, we started rolling out a new feature that gives sellers the ability to list items with discounted shipping to a small segment of sellers. Previously, shipping discounts were only available through private negotiations and offers.
• This month we reintroduced Posh Party LIVE, which is a flagship Poshmark event series that goes back to the early days of our founding and is a popular networking and social event for our community. Only this time, instead of physical events Posh Party LIVE will be held in a new virtual format. Poshers across the US, Canada and Australia will be able to join these virtual events to socialize and gain seller-focused educational programming.
• 2020 was an exceptional year for everyone in terms of just the stress that has been put on the system and the level of pressure every logistics carrier went through and USPS of course took a big brunt of it. We certainly see them rebounding and continuing to get healthier as the year progresses. But we want to serve our customers, our sellers and shoppers right. So we are going to look at what are the other things that we can offer them for different kinds of logistics over time. But we have a great partnership with USPS and remain committed to that partnership at least here for now.
• We have seen engagement from not just casual sellers but from professional sellers. We’ve also shared that independent brands have engaged with it and we continue to experiment in partnerships with the brands.
• Pets has been a growing part of the business. And it’s something that we’ve seen organically appear in the marketplace.
• Poshmark will continue to be a place where you can save money, make money, and find human connection.

Complete Posh Earnings Information

Please see the Poshmark Investor Relations website for more details on the company’s fourth-quarter and full-year 2020 results.