As the demand for resale luxury goods continues to grow, so too does the technology to make the products authentic.
It’s estimated that the luxury resale market will be worth approximately $50 billion in 2023. Some of the regular (and well-established) players at the forefront of the market include The RealReal and Vestiaire Collective.
Each platform assures us that they are committed to providing quality and, above all, authentic products. But experience shows that it’s easier said than done: even industry veteran The RealReal has been accused by customers of selling counterfeit goods.
Enter Entrupy, an AI-powered luxury authentication platform that leverages computer vision to identify counterfeit goods. Founded in 2016, the platform has raised millions of dollars, quickly gained traction among retailers and online resellers, and now has an ongoing partnership with TikTok Shop as the official authentication provider for the platform’s pre-owned luxury handbags and sneakers.
Authenticity: Ultimately, the company aims to build “a complete solution for the B2B world at global scale,” co-founder and CEO Vidyuth Srinivasan told Retail Brew. “We’re enabling businesses to authenticate products on demand. So if I’m a pawnbroker or an online reseller who just received an item, I can use Entrupy to take images of the item and add metadata around it. And then I upload those images to our app, which then goes to the cloud, where we have machine learning algorithms that make a call on whether it’s something that we can certify as authentic or not. So if it’s authentic, the consumer is inclined to accept the certificate, and that certificate comes with a financial guarantee.”
This technology certainly removes a lot of the guesswork and makes things a lot easier for resellers and retailers, but does it inspire consumer trust when compared to more traditional authentication techniques that allow for expert physical analysis?
“Our basic thesis is that AI is good at finding relationships in invisible data, and by training it on real products, it can understand the size and relationships between features on the surface of the product,” John Harmon, CFA and senior analyst at Coresight Research, told Retail Brew in an email. “AI and computer vision will be able to ‘see’ the ‘funny’ features, colors, and relationships that even experts can’t see. But computer vision can’t determine the feel of an item’s material. AI is not infallible, so it’s best used in conjunction with expert physical analysis.”
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But Srinivasan claims Entrupy is unique in the AI certification space, having built a “track record” of millions of certified products and an inventory worth “billions of dollars.”
“This is data that’s used every day to train and improve what we already have,” he said. “So we’re a data company that catches both real and counterfeit products.”
Hello, partners. But perhaps the most testament to its credibility is its significantly expanded collaboration with TikTok Shop. The partnership started with luxury handbags, but now includes pre-owned sneakers. TikTok Shop officially launched its “pre-owned luxury” category in April, but the platform has been driving revenue for resale companies since last year.
“Our research shows that while influencers enjoy a great deal of trust from customers, there is a trust gap on some platforms and people don’t necessarily feel confident in the authentication practices of platforms, even when they’re selling from their own closet and can at least display their products and talk about quality and issues like wear and tear that may tip the scales more credibly,” Claire Tassin, retail and e-commerce analyst at Morning Consult, told Retail Brew. “TikTok shops are carving out a unique position in the market.”
With that in mind, it makes sense that resale is a key market for TikTok, making Entrupy a perfect partner. As the relationship between the two companies expands, Srinivasan said this isn’t the end, though he declined to name any specifics.
