GoodwillFinds, The Online Thrift Store, Expands To Meet Strong Demand For Resale

Goodwill Industries launched its ecommerce platform GoodwillFinds five months ago, and quickly saw there was strong demand online for its thrift shop offerings. Now, the ecommerce site is adding new Goodwill partners across the country, and is preparing to double the size of its marketplace.

GoodwillFinds, which gives Goodwill members a platform that makes it easy for them to do online sales, announced today that it has added three regional members to the platform, bringing the number of Goodwill stores linked to it to 360.

The online platform also has bolstered its executive team with two key hires – chief technology officer and chief revenue officer – and is planning to more than double its staff from approximately 20 currently to 50 people.

“We realized that we kind have a tiger by the tail here, and we need to go faster with scaling demand,” Matthew Kaness, Chief Executive Officer at GoodwillFinds said in an interview.

Global sales of secondhand clothing are expected to grow by 127% by 2026, and most of that growth will be driven by online sales, according to a report by research firm GlobalData for online consignment store ThredUp.

The bulk of growth in resale is happening online, and GoodwillFinds enables local Goodwill stores to share in that gowth, Kaness said.

“They’re able to capture higher margins on the donated item, they’re able to grow much faster, they’re able to participate in this circularity, which means hiring more people to staff their ecommerce operations,” he said.

The nonprofit Goodwill Industries has 155 individual members who serve specific regions. Many of those members have long been offering select items for sale online on eBay or other platforms. GoodwillFinds, however, has the advantage of being able to tell the Goodwill story, and provide members with analytics to help drive sales, Kaness said.

GoodwillFinds also can cross-list items for members on other sites if they don’t sell on GoodwillFinds. “So we manage the full lifecycle for each of the items that are listed with us,” Kaness said.

Net proceeds from sales are returned to the region where the item was donated, and that offered it for sale online.

Since GoodwillFinds launched in October, 2022, the site has listed some 250,000 items for sale, and expects to have one million items on the marketplace by the end of this year.

A group of Goodwill members suggested forming a combined platform to better leverage their online potential.

The original members using the platform were Goodwill of Colorado, Goodwill of Southern California, Evergreen Goodwill (Washington State), Goodwill of Central and Southern Indiana, and Goodwill Industries of Southern Wisconsin, which includes Chicago;

The new members announced today are Goodwill Industries of South Florida, Goodwill Akron, and Goodwill Industries of Greater Cleveland and East Central Ohio.

GoodwillFinds plans to add three additional members next month, which will more than double the scale of the marketplace.

And more members are asking to join as well, Kaness said. “We have over a dozen that we’re speaking to right now to launch by the fall,” he said. “The platform is designed for the whole network. The founders created GoodwillFinds in anticipation of serving the entire network at some point,” he said.

Member stores “have a whole process set up at donation where they identify items that they separate and curate for ecommerce,” Kaness said.

Nicolas Genest, who previously worked at Modcloth, as well as Walmart US ecommerce and luxury resale site TheRealReal, has joined GoodwillFinds as chief technology officer. Jim Davis, formerly with Office Depot, Dell, and Urban Outfitters, as well as other omnichannel brands, has been named chief revenue officer.

Genest also is the founder of CodeBoxx, an ed-tech startup that retrains people for jobs in the digital economy. That mission aligns “really well with the Goodwill mission,” with its focus on job training and job placement, Kaness said.

Davis, in his position as chief revenue offier, will lead all revenue-generating aspects of platform, including performance marketing, demand generation, site merchandising, and operations.

The GoodwillFinds platform, Kaness said, give shoppers the ability to find items donated from all over the country, rather than being limited to the offerings in their local Goodwill store.

“This is a massive value-add for the consumer,” he said. “When they do thrift shopping in person, they are shopping what other people in their local community donate. But when they’re doing online thrifting with GoodwillFinds, they’re getting access to the entire country.”

“We’re going to have not just one of the biggest specialty secondhand catalogs in the U.S. and eventually the biggest, but also we are pulling from donators across the country, with the diversity and breadth of items, and styles, trends, vintage, collectibles and genres and brands, everything you can imagine,” he said.

GoodwilFinds also is drawing a diverse customer base. According to initial data, about half of purchasers have been under 35. “It’s been a really nice demographic mix – GenZ and millenial shoppers but also GenX and baby boomer shoppers,” Kanness said.

Non-apparel items such as musical instruments, electronics, jewelry, and collectibles have shown surprising strength on the platform, he said.

The long-term goal of GoodwillFinds, Kaness said, is to create a data and tech platform that Goodwill members can use to support their physical stores, as well as online sales.

“Eventually we will extend the platform to support the Goodwills offline in how they engage with their local communities, from donation all the way through sales and engagement with their social serivces,” he said.