Tradesy Takes on Resale-Retail and Wins Favor With LA Investors

What do most entertainment industry professionals and startup founders have in common? They’re use to hearing no.

“I can’t count how many times I heard no after I’d given a pitch that felt like it went well,” says Tracy DiNunzio, founder and CEO of Tradesy.com and Recycled Bride. Trained as a painter, she funded Recycled Bride by selling her wares: working, as an artist DiNunzio got accustomed to hearing no. But, she says, even though she’d heard no many times before, she still wasn’t prepared for the knockdowns she faced when she sought funding for Tradesy.

“It’s unbelievable how crushed you get each time,” DiNunzio says.

Tradesy founder Tracy DiNunzio

She’s learned that getting turned down isn’t the end of the world, but a motivation to fight harder for her idea, to make it a reality for consumers—buyers and sellers alike. Hearing “no,” to a pitch was a challenge: it forced her to refine her concept for Tradesy, its market position and value proposition in a way that investors could get behind.

Tradesy Takes on Resale-Retail

Tradesy, based in Santa Monica, launched in October 2012 to fill what DiNunzio saw as a gaping hole in the resale-retail market: the clothes in your closet you’re not wearing, and aren’t likely to wear any time soon, present a potential cash cow. DiNunzio figured that if she could make an ecommerce retail-resale site that made it easy to list clothes for sale—simply use the Tradesy app to snap pics with your smartphone and list your item—and buy clothes from other people’s closets she could create a peer-to-peer marketplace where buyers and sellers would decide the “true market value, not obscured by the middleman.”