Poshmark acquires sneaker authentication platform

Poshmark Inc. has purchased Suede One, a solution using machine learning, computer vision, and human review to virtually authenticate sneakers.

This marks the online fashion resale marketplace’s first acquisition. Founded in 2020, Suede One's technology enables an inventoryless approach to authentication. The technology analyzes product images, running algorithms on consistencies to identify whether an item is real or counterfeit.

According to Suede One, for popular brand name sneakers, its platform can automatically authenticate the majority of submissions with greater than 99% accuracy, based on internal testing. For other sneaker types, human experts review the submission with input from the company's proprietary authenticator tool.

Poshmark plans to leverage Suede One's virtual authentication capabilities to complement its Posh Protect offering, which guarantees a full refund for any item not matching its listing description. The solution will also support its Posh Authenticate service, which will continue to offer free authentication by Poshmark's team of luxury experts for orders of $500 or more.

With this acquisition, Poshmark plans to augment and scale its Posh Protect and Posh Authenticate services to support both buyers and sellers on more transactions and begin offering virtual authentication for sneakers at multiple price points, with the potential to expand to additional categories.

Poshmark is not the only e-commerce marketplace with a strong resale component to branch into sneaker authentication. eBay offers an “Authenticity Guarantee” service for sneaker sales on the platform. Through this program, all new and pre-owned collectible sneakers sold on eBay for over $100 in the U.S. will be fully vetted and verified by an independent team of industry experts.

When a sneaker purchase is made, the seller ships it directly to eBay's independent third-party authentication facility for a comprehensive, multi-point physical inspection. An eBay tag, guaranteeing its authenticity is attached to the sneakers to finalize the process Following this assessment, the sneakers are sent via expedited shipping to the buyer.  

"We are laser-focused on making strategic investments that fuel the continued growth of our business, give the best overall experience for buyers and make our marketplace the number one, most trusted destination for sellers," said Manish Chandra, founder and CEO of Poshmark. "Suede One has built impressive capabilities in virtual authentication that will allow us to deliver tangible benefits to our community, scale our authentication services in a meaningful way, and accelerate our momentum in sneakers as well as luxury goods, two of the fastest-growing categories in the resale space. We are thrilled to welcome the Suede One team to Poshmark and look forward to what we can build together."

"We built this company to solve a key challenge for the reseller community—creating technology that protects them from fraud and ensures fast, accurate authentication that they can rely on," said Matt Forloine, CEO of Suede One. "Poshmark and Suede One share the same values of trust and focus on community, and by joining forces we'll be able to advance our technology and scale these services to more products and categories and benefit as many people as possible."

Suede One employees have joined the Poshmark workforce.