LONDON — Online fashion resale platform Reflaunt is courting what it has identified as some of the most powerful players behind the scenes in the resale industry — personal shoppers, stylists and private client advisers — with the launch of Folio, a dedicated resale service rooted in a business-to-business infrastructure once reserved for luxury players like Balenciaga and Harvey Nichols.
The official launch on Tuesday, opening to a wider cohort of fashion professionals, followed an invite-only pilot that began last January.
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For Stéphanie Crespin, Reflaunt’s cofounder and chief executive officer, the timing is directly linked to how the luxury market is reacting to the current geopolitical climate.
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Citing a Bain & Company report, Crespin said that, despite the personal luxury goods market losing 60 million consumers since 2022, the top 2 to 4 percent of clients still account for 30 to 40 percent of all luxury spending, and are projected to drive up to 80 percent of the sector’s growth through 2027.
“Brands know this. The entire industry is recalibrating around that ultra-high-net-worth segment. And who holds those relationships? Not the brands. Personal shoppers do, and they are far more powerful stakeholders than the industry has ever recognized,” she said, adding that those professionals have effectively been running shadow resale operations for years.
“They were going to clients’ homes, photographing items themselves, creating listings one by one across multiple platforms. Enormously time-consuming, and frankly not where they add value,” Crespin continued.
Hence the creation of Folio, a tool these people have been seeking for quite some time. It sits on top of Reflaunt’s existing infrastructure, which includes eight international hubs, multimarketplace distribution and what the company describes as white-glove operations spanning authentication, photography, pricing and fulfillment.
Folio enables those who are managing some of the best-curated wardrobes in the world to simultaneously list and manage across multiple resale marketplaces such as Vestiaire Collective, Poshmark, The RealReal, ThredUp and Rebag to drive higher sell-through.
“The entry point is a wardrobe and a relationship, not a brand’s e-commerce checkout,” Crespin said, adding a stylist managing five or 10 high-net-worth clients, tracking 300 live listings, can unlock “far more inventory than any single brand program.”
Also, the multiplatform approach has helped move categories like ready-to-wear that “single-platform consignment programs struggle with,” Crespin touted. Usually, top-performing items belong to handbags and watches from leading luxury brands.
Folio is built around high rewards for the stylists and personal shoppers, who Crespin described as “supply partners and distribution channels at the same time.” With the tool, they earn a share of their clients’ resale proceeds and can channel those earnings back into new purchases, mirroring how they already help clients rotate wardrobes.
The service comes with a referral program for both clients and stylists, which pays out in cash rather than credits. Crespin said this offering is “a concrete signal that the model is profitable enough to share returns with every participant.”
On the brand side, she believes the arrival of Folio addresses concerns around control and pricing. “What Reflaunt brings, and what Folio extends to the stylist channel, is professional photography, authentication and pricing that reflects actual condition and market value,” she added.
Following the launch, Crespin said Reflaunt is already in “advanced discussions” with several fashion brands and multibrand retailers to adapt the tool for in-house clienteling teams and to use Folio as a demand-capture channel, offering sellers the choice between cash or higher-value brand vouchers.
Ultimately, Crespin believes Folio will become more than a tool for independent stylists, but “a blueprint for how brands can make resale a native layer of the luxury client experience, not a separate aftermarket.”
Founded in 2017, Reflaunt offers “resale as a service” technology, which allows shoppers to resell their old wardrobe pieces directly through the stores where they originally bought them.
It has secured $11 million in series A funding around led by Ventech and Bombyx ventures, following raising $2.7 million in a pre-series A funding round led by SLS Journey, the investment arm of luxury fashion distributor MadaLuxe Group, as well as Nicolaj Reffstrup, Pierre Denis, Maximilian Bittner, and The Luxury Fund.
Initial investors in the company also included Yellow Octopus Group, Saint Laurent CEO Cédric Charbit and Swarovski creative director Giovanna Battaglia.