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Luxury resale company Reklaim launched in 2022 with the mission of making designer goods available to the masses, using its AI-powered platform to source $10 billion worth of luxury watches and handbags from brands like Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Chanel.
Over the last three years, Reklaim has partnered with department stores like Nordstrom and Selfridges to make its AI-sourcing capabilities more accessible to consumers. Let’s say a customer wants a very specific Chanel bag: They search the platform and AI runs through its list of providers to find that exact Chanel bag. Sounds easy enough, but the devil’s in the details.
One of those details: who holds the keys to the AI kingdom. Reklaim is taking the next step in its retail evolution with its new vice president of business development and sales, Peter Englehart, who previously worked at Tiffany & Co. and Swarovski.
“I’m a shopkeeper at heart,” Englehart said. “For me, regardless of what I’ve done in my career, it’s about the last three feet between that sales professional and the consumer. Having excellence at point of sale includes training. It includes a lot of different details, but it includes having the right product in the right place as well. With that mindset, that’s the way I'm looking at this [role] going to market.”
Going small
While its e-commerce platform was launched this spring, Reklaim’s president Gary Schoenfeld said the bulk of the brand’s revenue is still coming through physical retail partnerships, which currently extends across jewelry stores, travel retail, and department stores. Reklaim declined to provide revenue details for this story.
One of Englehart’s main tasks is expanding those retail partnerships to include independent retailers, specifically local or family-owned jewelry stores. He explained this strategy allows for these smaller businesses and their customers to have access to luxury labels that wouldn’t traditionally be available in these stores. Schoenfeld is betting on a win-win-win situation for retailers, for consumers, and of course, for Reklaim. Since Reklaim works as a sourcing platform, the company and its retail partners don’t have to worry about housing inventory, which can reduce costs and eliminates a major barrier to entry into the resale market.
“We want to give independent jewelry stores the opportunity to have the kind of assortment that they would like to have for their customers,” he said. “Similarly, for customers that have developed relationships with those independent jewelry stores that go for many years, to be that trusted destination for them to find these conscious luxury brands in an environment that they would expect.”
Englehart is still working out the kinks of Reklaim’s independent retail strategy, but he said the platform is first looking regionally within the US. Englehart already has relationships with retailers across North America and the Caribbean from his previous roles.
The draw of these jewelry stores is the close-knit relationship shop owners have with their customers, according to Englehart. Reklaim is looking at many family-owned businesses that have been trusted sources in their communities for years. With luxury products in high demand, Englehart said, retailers can become frustrated when they don’t have access to the products their customers are asking for.
“I spent 22 years in fine jewelry retail and nine in branded wholesale and also a period in manufacturing, so I’ve seen the value chain from a lot of different perspectives,” Englehart said. “What I love about Reklaim is it’s about reclaiming the power of the consumer, both from an end consumer basis, as well as from the retailer standpoint, to be able to buy what you want, when you want it.”