Growth Mindset Innovation

Reinventing Community

Manish Chandra

05.16.22

As the CEO of Poshmark, Manish Chandra knows very well how fickle fashion can be – especially among younger generations of clients who are not as “brand-centric.” To tackle changing consumer habits, Manish believes it’s important to reinvent community.

Summary:

As the CEO of Poshmark, Manish Chandra knows very well how fickle fashion can be – especially among younger generations of clients who are not as “brand-centric.” To tackle changing consumer habits, Manish believes it’s important to reinvent community.

Thuy

Well, I don’t need to tell you this, fashion can be fickle; people’s taste, loyalty, their habits change all the time. And if you’re a company like Poshmark, the way people use technology also evolves. How do you help the people you lead to come up with new processes or procedures to effectively navigate all that change?
Manish_Chandra

Manish Chandra

I’ll give you an example of some of the stuff we’ve done recently. As the world has sort of evolved over the last two years, even the user’s affinity with fashion brands is changing and evolving. Certain brands are enduring; certain brands are changing. And so if you see the younger customer, which is sort of our primary customer, Gen Z, Millennials, and even Gen Alpha, as they’re coming up, their focus is less brand centric, besides a few brands, as they’re still trying to find new things.
And so brands obviously have been a core part of Poshmark, and they still are, but one of the things we recently launched is something called Trends, which was actually repurposing and integrating a bunch of different technologies together. And that idea came from our own community, our own internal community and sort of partnering with them. And just pivoting the thinking that people can really start to brainstorm and go there. And similarly, the whole world of community is evolving. People are not part of just one community, they’re a part of many different micro communities.
And so, for us, we are also reinventing community on Poshmark. And a lot of it has to do with, again, partnering with the thought leaders and many times the thought leaders could be the 23-year-old who just joined the company, it may not be the most seasoned professional. So, bringing the experts and the fresh thinking together, and just listening to that interaction is powerful.