How Bizarre is Bazar? Meet the Fast Fashion Marketplace
Alexandra Harrell
5 min read
Meet Bazar: a sustainability-focused marketplace specializing in overstock products and customer returns. The San Francisco startup also serves as a logistical solution for DTC brands to offload products, acting as a sustainability-angled, off-price channel partner.
Bazar claims to reinvent the way e-commerce players handle their overproduced products by offering a sustainability-focused, tech-enabled solution. That solution extends a product’s lifecycle, recovers sunken costs, reduces waste and “changes the way consumers shop from the ground up.”
What’s new here? The brands are predominately fast fashion.
“The reason we partner with fast fashion brands is because we don’t really produce our own goods. We just want to sell the already produced goods and prevent them from going to landfill,” Annie Hu, Bazar’s co-founder and CEO, told Sourcing Journal. “And those fast fashion brands have the most—when a product goes viral, that product also has more returns. So that’s why we started with fast fashion.”
To back up a bit, Bazar is backed by two venture capital firms—General Catalyst and Abstract Ventures. It also has the backing of founders and executives from the likes of Meta, Twitch, WooCommerce, Eventbrite and Creative Artists Agency (CAA). Which makes sense, given Hu’s background.
After attending UC Berkeley, Hu became the head of U.S. investments at venture capital firm, ZhenFund. During her four-year stint at the Chinese early-stage firm, Hu took stock of the challenges international brands faced when dealing with returns and overstock; something she attributed to a “lack of logistics infrastructure” within the states. These observations pushed her to launch this marketplace dedicated to fixing these issues while promoting sustainability and circularity.
“When I was in college, thrifting wasn’t really a thing. There was a Buffalo Exchange and a Crossroads Trading near campus, but we never really thought [that] thrifting was something cool,” Hu said. “But I think during Covid, because of TikTok and Gen Z, it does help with awareness raising so we do want to raise awareness both on the brand side and on the consumer side.”
Since its launch in February, Bazar has “found new homes” for hundreds of thousands of products from 60-plus partners, including Motel Rocks, Commense, Cider and Halara; the types of brands Salesforce previously called “Chinese shopping applications.”
“The brand and product lineup is curated to appeal to the trend-conscious Gen-Z audience,” reads a deck made on Canva by the company. “Every item on Bazar is stylish, relevant, and in demand.”
Another thing those items are? Predominantly polyester. Motel Rocks, for example, has its Shantique Midi Dress listed on Bazar for $38.79—a 55 percent discount of the allegedly original retail price of about $86.
A quick cross-reference to the independent brand’s website shows that the dress was listed at $78 before being discounted to $39. It’s 96 percent polyester and 4 percent elastane, though that information isn’t available on Bazar. What is available, however, is the amount of water saved—in this case, 1,000 gallons.
The same can be said for Commense. Its Palazzo Tied Wide Leg Dress Pants are listed on Bazar for $22.50, half off the original retail price. Per the China-based brand’s website, the pants are 100 percent polyester. For good measure, Sourcing Journal confirmed that the Cider products and Halara pieces listed on Bazar also followed the same formula.
“Bazar has been a game-changer for us,” Cider is quoted in Bazar’s Canva-made deck. “Their sustainable marketplace resonates deeply with our Gen-Z customers, enhancing our brand’s appeal and commitment to sustainability.”
Meanwhile, Halara’s quote says Bazar “opened up a brand-new distribution channel that we previously had not considered, while ensuring we retained full control over our brand’s representation and channel strategies.”
The issue at hand—which is that the items are being advertised as sustainable choices despite the material matrix and sourcing details being inaccessible—is not lost on Hu, however.
“We will definitely ask our brands for the material details. I think our customers have been asking as well,” Hu said. “When we built our integration with the brands, that information was not part of our initial integration. That’s why it’s missing; it’s definitely not intentional.”
Which makes sense, considering the purpose of Bazar is to sell what would otherwise burn.
“On average, 12 percent of all apparel, accessories, beauty and home goods produced worldwide remains unsold at the end of every season, resulting in a total of $180 billion in lost sales and a $180 billion increase in waste,” per the Meta-backed brand. In a separate, Canva-made presentation, Bazar claims that “returns accounted for 14.5 percent of all fashion retail sales, resulting in a total of $743 billion in lost sales and a $743 billion increase in waste.”
The reason? 3PLs are “simply not built for returns.”
According to the San Francisco startup, fashion brands carry the “additional weight” of processing, restocking and potential loss of merchandise value to handle returned items—not to mention international shipping and tariff costs associated with overseas manufacturers and brands. On average (per Bazar’s calculations) it costs 66 percent of the product’s price to process a return. Thus, by selling returns, greenhouse gas emissions are avoided by “preventing the unnecessary disposal and destruction of inventory.”
While the goal of Bazar is to sell what brands cannot—overstock and returns—the inevitable race to the bottom is of concern.
“I think we have a love-hate relationship with fast fashion; I don’t think fast fashion is a really bad thing. It’s making fashion more accessible by democratizing good designs or trendy designs,” Hu said. “With social media, trends just rotate so fast nowadays. It’s kind of sad if you don’t have enough disposable income, you can’t buy something that’s like $400. On the other hand, how do we make fast fashion better?”
