Even though he is 47 years old, the Milanese Simon Beckerman still looks like one of those 20-year-olds who found startups dreaming of creating unicorns, companies with a billion valuation. The only difference is that he has just sold his Depop for 1.625 billion dollars to Etsy, the American giant of artisanal e-commerce, and while he tells it he has to keep changing rooms because in the company he founded ten years ago I am ongoing meeting after meeting to talk about the consequences of the exit. Depop, the second Italian unicorn after Yoox, is a kind of Instagram where users, mostly under 26, sell and buy vintage garments. In the morning Josh Silverman, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Etsy, asked him for a hand to grow the company towards generation Z, those born at the turn of the second millennium: “This is surreal” Beckerman can only say. . Meanwhile, he founded another startup, Delli, a food Depop, for which he raised a few million pounds from HV Capital, former investors of Depop.
“The team is delighted because Etsy shares our same values and principles,” says the founder of Depop, who in 2011 presented it as a community-based marketplace with social functions. Which made investors smile. Beckerman, however, managed to convince them with his vision: “My bet was that the new generations would want to buy more and more vintage garments, used or new, but produced by companies that cared about sustainability”. Over the years, he says, “I have learned that our generation of sustainability only talks about it, while young people live it”. Vintage, which in the meantime extended from the 1980s to the 2000s and which reached its boom in 2020 (when Depop doubled its turnover), now covers 90 percent of the exchanges that take place on the app. “There are people who with 50 euros will rebuild their wardrobe in a week and then sell everything the following week, sometimes even making money”.
Before Depop, Beckerman founded two other companies, always relying on external agencies in the initial phase, so as not to waste time on hiring: “But now I have understood that it is not the right way. People are the most important part of the company: relying on outsiders means generating know-how which is then lost “. In Depop, hiring talents was one of the activities he most dedicated to: “I always ask you to tell me about the projects they have worked on, what they have learned from their failures, and where their ideas come from”. His idea comes from his experience with PIG Magazine, an independent magazine on fashion and creative arts of which he was editor and founder.
It is in that experience that Beckerman finds himself collaborating with Nike, a pioneer company in influencer marketing, when influencers did not yet know they were. Initially Depop, which was initially called Garage, is a social network where users can buy items from creatives promoted by Beckerman’s magazine. It works and Beckerman is betting that he will be able to take advantage of the techniques he learned from Nike to transform the app into a marketplace mobile first, that is, designed for smartphones that are starting to spread even among young people. We start from Italy: after launching the app, the Depop team sends about fifty invitations to people with a certain following and when Chiara Ferragni, then “only” the blogger of the moment in the fashion world, starts talking about Depop Beckerman understands that the path taken is the right one. He then decides to focus on England because the Anglo-Saxon market is more developed, and the project takes off. But he is not ready.
“The biggest mistake I made was reading little: there are several bibles in the startup world that would have saved me from all those mistakes I’ve made,” Beckerman confesses. Who has a great gift: the humility to recognize one’s limitations. In agreement with the investors, in 2014 he decided to entrust the leadership of the company to a CEO experienced in the growth of innovative companies and to take on the role of creative director. At the same time he hires Maria Raga, a Spanish manager with experience in Groupon and Privalia, who discovers she has excellent creative management skills. Two years later Raga is ready to become CEO: she raises about 100 million dollars, together with Beckerman builds the new management team and puts the company on a track for growth. “I thought they would go public in two or three years – says the first investor Riccardo Donadon, founder of H-Farm, a venture capital released in 2019 with a sixfold return on investment. Instead then came Etsy.
To understand Etsy’s interest we rely on Raga’s words: “Depop is a place where new generations come to explore a unique fashion and stay there for the culture they find. Our community is made up of people who are creating a new fashion system, made up of new trends and in which the new comes from the old “. In 2013 Giorgia Ulivieri wrote in her blog Bo-utique: “If you join Depop, you risk not going to shop anymore”.
While preparing the launch of Delli, Beckerman admits that his dream is “to return to Italy and share the experience I have gained with young people”. Who knows what happens on the H-Farm campus where students, entrepreneurs and professionals live together and contaminate each other, and where until recently Depop was part of the engineering team: “Depop needed much more time than we imagined and this it teaches our entire ecosystem that patience is needed – comments Donadon – Until a few years ago it was necessary to go abroad to raise large capital, but now this is no longer the case ”.
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