The Future of Fashion & Sustainability | 22 Beni: The Digital Thrift Store at Your Fingertips

Take a second, and imagine having a personal assistant who taps you on your shoulder each time you browse for a new dress or a cardigan. They pull together a list of thrifted clothes, perfectly matching what you’re looking to buy. While we all can’t have a personal assistant, we can download Beni to be our digital sidekick. Beni is an online tool that helps customers save money and buy sustainably through resale fashion. With rapid advancements in generative AI technology over the last three years, we’re getting closer to a more personalized and curated shopping experience. With the latest developments from Beni, finding and buying secondhand just got even easier. On this week’s episode of TechCouture, I sat down with Catherine Sullivan - Beni’s Sr. Marketing Director to chat about resale fashion, community, and the future of shopping.

Beni co-founders Kate Sanner and Sarah Pinner met at Northwestern, with 3rd co-founder Celine Lightfoot joining soon after. They understood the magnitude of impact they could have by working on solving sustainable fashion and, ultimately, helping expand people’s access to more affordable sustainable fashion. They discovered that “a lot of people are open to shopping secondhand, but they find the process time-consuming and clunky.” While a person can comb through ThredUp, Vestiaire Collective, RealReal, or their favorite brand’s resale page one by one, the founders realized the process was inefficient at best and, at worse, deterred consumers from shopping secondhand online. They sought to make shopping secondhand online just as easy as shopping for anything else by reducing friction and making the whole experience a lot easier for the customer.

How does Beni make this process seamless for customers? Beni aggregates items across a ton of different resale marketplaces and trains their system to be a “secondhand sidekick [for customers] that just taps them on the shoulder and tells them if a resale alternative is available for something that they want to buy.” People can access Beni’s free service in several ways: the Beni app, downloading the Beni extension for their browser, or searching exactly what they’re looking for through checkbeni.com.

The Beni app and browser extension give users access to upwards of 200 million resale items at their fingertips. Using the Beni app and checkbeni.com, users can type and search exactly what they’re looking for or copy and paste a product URL to see results. Beni will do the hard part and aggregate the exact or closest finds from across their partner platforms. Beni makes shopping secondhand fun, convenient, and accessible. 

Checkbeni.com

Why the emphasis on accessibility? Shopping secondhand can often seem costly or time-consuming. Beni welcomes consumers who have traditionally bought secondhand, but the startup also wants to be a welcoming space for “people who are new to resale.” That meant framing the company’s marketing messaging to talk more about cost savings and convenience, on top of sustainability. As a result, Beni’s drawn “a lot more of those people who are new to resale into our community.” Beni wants to transform how we think about buying clothes and sustainability. Creating a strong sense of community allows the company to have a larger impact and that starts with “meeting people where they are and helping them navigate this world in the easiest way possible to them.”

It’s not just new buyers beginning to opt in for secondhand garments. Spurred by an uptick in sustainability-focused regulation and consumer interest, more brands are participating in brand-owned secondhand resale. With the global market for secondhand apparel & footwear resale expected to reach $350B globally, and $73B alone in the U.S. by 2027, services like Beni will be crucial for brands to get in front of new customers. Beni “provides an opportunity for those brands to extend the customer lifetime value of the shoppers.” Catherine believes the recent wave of regulation and subsequent brand interest in secondhand helps Beni and helps solve “this huge problem that we're trying to solve and definitely can't do alone.”

On the topic of community, Beni plans to keep their community engaged and an active participant in the conversation around sustainability. Beni is launching the Beni Resale Collective, made up of active users, whether sustainable shoppers, content creators, thrifters, or someone in between, who can “offer their direct feedback, whether that's on the product, or on [the] mission, and really engage and meet with other people.” Rather than being a traditional affiliate or customer loyalty program, the collective gives users a sense of ownership in Beni’s future.

When asked what Beni is focused on over the next 6 months to a year, Catherine simply said they want to make Beni the best product that it can be for its wide range of users. As more partners across the fashion ecosystem promote their secondhand options, Beni will continue to play a greater role in changing consumer behavior for the better. Shopping secondhand is a great way to shop sustainably and access brands or products that were previously out of reach. Maybe we can’t all have a personal assistant, but Beni can be that digital sidekick enhancing the shopping experience and making the purchase of secondhand items feel like second nature.