Luxury marketplace Reebonz grows up with new $29m ecommerce hub in Singapore

The new Reebonz building in Singapore. Photo credit: Reebonz.

It’s been a while since we last heard from Reebonz, the Singapore-headquartered ecommerce site for luxury fashion. The company hasn’t been idle – just this week it announced the official opening of its Ecommerce Hub, a 200,000-square foot building that will house its entire business in Singapore.

The new headquarters – so new they are literally still laying down roads around it – will house Reebonz’s management and operations as well as its entire warehousing and distribution facilities.

Reebonz expects to reach profitability by the end of this year.

Since raising US$40 million in a series C round from investors like Singapore’s Mediacorp and Vertex Ventures in 2013, the company has been beefing up its consumer-centric platforms. Besides selling its own inventory to customers and bridging online and offline through physical pop-up stores, Reebonz offers various other methods for users to sell and buy pre-owned stuff – always revolving around luxury clothing and accessories.

For example, Closets is a Carousell-like app for listing and selling your own items. White Glove is where Reebonz takes your pre-owned designer item, authenticates it, takes professional shots of it, and puts it up for sale. And Boutiques allows fashion merchants to move their inventory online.

This multi-layer approach allows Reebonz to carefully curate its business-to-consumer offering without breaking the bank. “We will only buy the best brands and products and we focus a lot on accessories,” co-founder Daniel Lim tells Tech in Asia. “The marketplaces allow us to get that long tail of products that we might otherwise not buy in stock.”

Pre-owned items from its peer-to-peer marketplaces now account for 45 percent of Reebonz’s gross merchandise volume, Lim says. “It’s a growing part of the business and it gives us scalability.”

The new headquarters stays on brand with luxurious open office spaces. Photo credit: Reebonz.

A new home

The US$29 million Ecommerce Hub houses all of this in Singapore – from offices and warehouse space (complete with a robotic closet that securely stores items of value like watches, jewelry, and branded bags) to a dedicated exhibition space for boutique items. Reebonz is bringing independent luxury designers under its roof to showcase their products there, while also helping them market and sell online.

This is also where the authentication and grading of items happens. Experts verify that products are authentic and grade them according to their state of use. Products are marked with an invisible ink-like pen so that the company knows when an item that’s already gone through Reebonz’s certification process comes back in for sale. It saves time and resources, as the item doesn’t need to be re-authenticated.

Items are tagged, stored, and eventually shipped in Reebonz’s signature packaging of a black box wrapped in a gold ribbon.

Elsewhere, watch specialists test timepieces that come through the marketplace, leatherworkers touch up minor scrapes on items, and a gemologist makes sure that jewelry is up to par.

Reaching new markets