Piktina, a Vietnam-based and Vietnamese-founded fashion recommerce platform, announced the success of their seed funding round with a $1 million “commitment check” from Touchstone Partners on Monday.
Piktina is a digital merchandise playground that specializes in previously owned fashion items. Their goal is to provide a platform where everyone can refresh their personal style with unique thrift pieces while also gaining an easy passive income.
Through the Piktina platform, buyers and sellers can easily connect with each other as they free up closets. Their mission is to raise awareness of overconsumption and instill sustainability values in the community to reduce fashion waste and carbon emissions and conserve the environment.
The fashion recommerce platform plans to allocate the new funding to accelerate its growth and refine its business model. At the moment, Piktina charges a 20% commission fee for every successful transaction, including additional authentication costs if required.
Founded in June 2022 by Nguyen Hoang Phuong and Trinh Thanh Huyen, the Piktina app has debuted on both App Store and Google Play.
Phuong, Piktina’s CEO, is the former co-founder and CEO of the ride-sharing app Be Group JSC and the online banking app Cake. Bringing with her over 10 years of experience working in the fashion industry in Europe and the US, she has earned a profound knowledge of the inner workings of the fashion and luxury merchandise industries.
Huyen, on the other hand, is Piktina’s Chief Growth Officer who has years of experience leading multinational corporations in Southeast Asian markets. Like Phuong, Huyen also worked for Be and Cake in charge of business development and was responsible for the millions of users both apps have today.
While troubled by the fashion industry’s excess, the two women also realized the unlimited potential that the secondhand fashion market holds. Together, they built a team with the brightest minds who shared the core value of sustainability.
From there, Piktina was created to raise awareness and promote sustainable consumer behavior among Vietnamese youths, as well as develop a circular fashion economy in Vietnam and other markets within Asia.
Having Gen Z in mind as the primary target market, Piktina believes the younger generation of Vietnamese turn to secondhand fashion “not only for financial reasons but also the edginess it provides in contrast to fleeting fast-fashion trends.”
Tu Ngo, Touchstone Partners' general partner, said thriving innovation from a small enterprise is easier than from a big corporation. She added: “Doing business in an emerging market is an opportunity, not a weakness. Dream bigger; if you can create a product that is good enough, the sky is the limit".
Touchstone Partners, with Khanh Tran as the managing partner, aims to assist talented and driven founders to realize the potential of their businesses by applying their deep understanding of the Vietnamese market and utilizing a global network of connections.
The recommerce concept is the selling of previously owned items through online marketplaces to buyers who reuse, recycle or resell them. This business model was popularized by platforms like Craigslist and eBay.
Piktina takes inspiration from peer-to-peer social e-commerce company Depop, which was acquired by US-based Etsy for US$1.6 billion in 2021.