Denmark’s largest marketplace for families opens nationwide chain of stores

250,000 families with children use the app marketplace Reshopper every year to give their children’s items a new lease of life. Now the tech company is expanding the concept – including its own physical stores across the country.

Reshopper has grown over a decade from a small tech start-up to the mobile marketplace of choice for families with children. Now they’re taking it a step further: Reshopper will also have physical children’s clothing stores across the country, through an acquisition of Kids Group, which already buys cheap leftovers to sell in its Outletland chain.

And the vision and ambitions are big when two of Denmark’s biggest players in the outlet and second-hand market for families with children merge, says entrepreneur and investor Casper Blom, owner and CEO of Kids Group:

“We want to create a unique one-stop shopping experience using data and the app to make it easy to save money, minimise clothing waste and circulate goods time and time again,” says Casper Blom, who will be the new CEO of Reshopper.

“The interaction between the physical stores and the digital marketplace app helps to ensure that we can deliver what users want, when and where they want it. When the first Reshopper store opens very soon, our technology will support the circular mindset, which means that when you buy an item in the store, it is automatically registered with all the info in the app, so you can put the item up for sale again in the app in a snap when you’re done using it.”

These days, work is in full swing to transform the Outletland store in Kolding into the first ever Reshopper store. Later this year, families with children in Valby and another town on Zealand will have their own local Reshopper store.

Expanding the range with leftovers

So far, Reshopper’s success has been based on users’ own private second-hand sales on
marketplace, where there are currently three million active ads. Now Reshopper is also becoming a retailer itself, buying up items from remnants, bankruptcies, previous collections and returns to resell them in both the app and stores, where users can look forward to an even wider selection of children’s items.

“In a perfect world, there would be no overproduction and goods gathering dust in a warehouse, but that’s not the reality, and in the meantime, society can’t just turn a blind eye to the things that are already produced. For the past 10 years, Reshopper has helped families with children circulate their clothes so that they could be resold a second, third and maybe fifth time, and with the new concept we also want to help the clothes make their first sale and thus kick-start the circular journey of clothes in our universe,” explains Nicolai Danmark Johannesen, CCO and co-founder of Reshopper

Malaga sowed seeds of cooperation

The seed for the collaboration between Casper Blom and Reshopper was planted in 2019, when investor Jesper Buch invited founders from some of the companies he has invested in to a workaway camp at his house in Malaga. The two Reshopper co-founders Anders and Nicolai knew Casper beforehand, but it was only on this trip that a real chemistry emerged in the talks about business models and Reshopper’s future.

The contact was therefore kept, and after Casper Blom had bought Denmark’s largest physical outlet for children’s clothing in 2020, he approached Reshopper in 2021 to explore the possibilities of marketing cooperation. Along the way, however, the dialogue took a turn that had not been on the table before.

“We suddenly saw a possible synergy between our two companies, where we could create something unique through a merger. What if we could motivate consumers to first save these goods from leftovers and bankruptcies from going to waste and then give the goods new life again and again by circulating them on the digital marketplace after use? It all made sense,” says Nicolai Danmark Johannesen.

And board member and investor Jesper Buch sees great opportunities in the merger – not least from an international perspective.

“I think the link between Denmark’s strongest online children’s clothing platform and the physical outlet stores is super exciting, and I believe that if we create a successful Danish model, we can roll out the concept to other markets”

Big growth ambitions to benefit families with children

After the merger, Reshopper will have 15 permanent employees, 20 part-time employees and an expected turnover of just over DKK 45 million in the current financial year. But the ambitions are much bigger.

“With over a quarter of a million active users and several physical stores across the country, it’s not
unlikely that we can reach a turnover of DKK 100 million in the coming years. It will give us even more muscle to develop the business and create even more awareness of a model that supports families’ desire for more focus on sustainability in everyday life,” says Casper Blom and continues:

The price of the acquisition has not been disclosed.