Poshmark acquired a company that authenticates sneakers virtually as part of its efforts to grow sales in secondhand categories – particularly sneakers and luxury goods, the company said on Wednesday.
Suede One authenticates sneakers and will help Poshmark scale its authentication capabilities. Suede One combines machine learning, computer vision, and human review to virtually authenticate sneakers.
Poshmark’s press release describes Suede One’s approach:
“Founded in 2020, Suede One’s technology enables an inventoryless approach to authentication. The technology analyzes product images, running algorithms on consistencies to identify whether an item is real or counterfeit. For popular sneakers such as Jordan 1s and Yeezy 350s, Suede One can automatically authenticate the majority of submissions with greater than 99% accuracy, based on internal testing. For other sneaker types, human experts review the submission with help from the company’s proprietary authenticator tool. Suede One has built a reputation for credible and quick authentication with the broader resale community as well as esteemed resellers, authenticating a pair of Nike Air Yeezy 1 Prototypes that sold for $1.8 million at auction.”
It is Poshmark’s first acquisition and it did not disclose the terms of the deal. The Suede One team will join the Poshmark team, effective October 13th.
Poshmark already offers free authentication for orders of $500 or more (Poshmark Authenticate), and it said Suede One’s virtual authentication capabilities would complement its buyer protection program called Posh Protect, which guarantees a full refund for any item not matching its listing description.
“Poshmark will be able to augment and scale these services to support both buyers and sellers on more transactions and begin offering virtual authentication for sneakers at multiple price points, with the potential to expand to additional categories,” it said.
