Menswear Nerds Are Flocking to This EBay Alternative

Sunny Lam was on the hunt. The thirtysomething clothing designer and consultant in New York wanted—needed—rare pieces from the early 2000s by his cult favorites, Raf Simons and Helmut Lang. “I used to go on EBay, but it’s a bit of a migraine,” Lam says, explaining that the selection is disorganized, the photo quality stinks, and the best pieces sell almost instantly. Then Lam found Grailed, an online menswear resale shop that is to EBay what Saint Laurent Chelsea boots are to Crocs; a “grail” in internet menswear parlance is an article of clothing you’ve been searching for forever. Not long ago on the site, Lam scored a T-shirt from Simons’s summer 1998 Black Palm collection, a seminal look in Lam’s circles.

“Our motto is ‘Fire for All,’ ” says the company’s 28-year-old founder and chief executive officer, Arun Gupta, “fire” being street slang for, among other things, “really cool clothes.” He started Grailed in January 2014. At the time, Gupta was an active member of menswear message boards such as Styleforum and Superfuture, which were great for community building but not for buyers and sellers, who had to use third-party services to share images, negotiate prices, and process payments. There were resale sites for women’s wear—Tradesy and Poshmark—but nothing for the increasingly voracious men’s audience. “I was, like, ‘Hey, I could build a website and consolidate,’ ” Gupta says. Thrive Capital, which has put money into e-commerce successes such as eyewear company Warby Parker, was a seed investor.