The Dud Swap Goes Digital

Back in February I posted about Iqons, a social network for fashion mavens. Now comes OurThreads, a new social marketplace for buying, selling, trading and donating clothes and other sartorial objects. In one sense, OurThreads is like an online version of a dud swap: you have some old clothes you want to get rid of, so you trade them for someone else’s gently worn garb and voila! you have a new wardrobe for free. In another sense, it’s like eBay: you sell your old clothes online to earn some extra cash. But I think one of the best things about the site is that it acts as a platform for designers to get their work seen and sell their original pieces, cutting out the pesky problem of convincing a store to carry your goods.

OurThreads also has quite an interesting revenue model. Buying, trading, and donating is free, but OurThreads takes 3.5% of the selling price of an item. That’s pretty standard. What’s not so standard is that members can also purchase ads within the site (priced in bundles), in order to drive traffic to their “closet” (aka homepage).