Fashion brands: Trendsi’s got your back-end

Ecommerce has witnessed a meteoric rise over the last two decades. A new generation of commerce platforms and site generators democratized the sale of goods online by erasing barriers to launching online storefronts. Companies like Shopify, Wix, WooCommerce, Squarespace, Webflow, Commerce Layer, and others created tens of billions of dollars worth of value by optimizing front end storefront creation. Yet, despite their prominence and the subsequent flurry of 3000+ commerce enablement tools on the Shopify app store alone, managing the back-end of your ecommerce operation remains stuck in the 90s.

Lightspeed has been investing in back-end commerce solutions for years, including companies like Faire and Zetwerk. Our investment in Faire in particular highlighted the need for a robust wholesale solution in retail. Small brick and mortar retailers rely on selling new products from sought after brands, but lack the resources for product discovery and the balance sheets for new products experimentation. But what about brands or online merchants and their relationships upstream with manufacturers?

The crux of the challenge: there’s a perennial conflict between offering the best new products and managing increases in working capital requirements. To date, product selection and product costs have been irrevocably tied. Increase the former and the latter grows in lock step. Suppliers require minimum order placements, creating a working capital constraint that limits the volume of products offered at any given storefront. Purchasing inventory up front has also created what merchants dreadfully refer to as “inventory risk.”

Constraints around working capital made way for a stratospheric rise in dropshipping, which is projected to hit nearly $500B in global revenue by 2026. No minimum orders, no upfront costs, no logistical overhead — on the surface, dropshipping sounds almost too good to be true — in fact, many argue it is. Many sophisticated retailers associate dropshipping with a healthy degree of angst, predominantly tied to concerns around consistency and curation. How do you guarantee goods are shipped in consistent timeframes, that quality meets your brand’s standards, and that inventory is indeed available? Merchants are reluctant to give control, which is naturally at odds with the dropshipping model.

Enter Trendsi. Trendsi relieves merchants of inventory risk, supply chain overhead, and the resulting limitations in product selection. Trendsi’s marketplace connects sellers into a network of global suppliers with 100K+ SKUs available through a dropshipping model. They manage the supply chain to ensure shipping consistency and maintain strict measures on quality control. Their logistics integrations and tech platform provide a real time view on product availability, a crucial element in maintaining customer trust. Merchants can port over products from Trendsi’s marketplace to their storefront with the click of a button, complete with product pictures, descriptions, and size specs. Once a merchant’s customer places an order, Trendsi takes care of the rest with options for whitelabel packaging and invoicing.

Trendsi is a no-brainer for merchants and the resulting demand has been explosive. Trendsi has witnessed a nearly 10x y/y growth in customers and revenue, nearly all from inbound channels, testament to the significance of the pain they solve.

We were fortunate to meet Trendsi’s Founder and CEO, Ella Zhang, through our friend and her husband, Desmond Lim, founder of Workstream. What started as a chance run in to Ella while visiting Workstream’s office turned into a two hour deep dive into her business. Ella developed an appreciation for the intricacies of the ecommerce supply chain while working and investing in ecommerce companies for over 10 years. What struck us more than her domain expertise was her passion and scrappiness. Ella left her post as the head of Binance’s investment arm to found Trendsi out of her garage, which served as the dual-HQ for Trendsi and Workstream. 10pm all-hands meetings out of said garage were a regular occurrence. It became clear Ella would run through walls to make Trendsi a success, and we knew we had to be part of that journey. For all those reasons and more, we’re excited to announce Lightspeed’s $25M Series A investment in Trendsi.

Written by Arsham Memarzadeh and Alex Taussig