Adastria Group chooses Stripe to power its secondhand marketplace

TOKYO-Stripe, a financial infrastructure platform for businesses, today announced that it has been selected by Adastria Group to power the Japanese apparel company's new secondhand clothing marketplace, dot-C. Adastria, which recently celebrated its 70th anniversary, operates a chain of clothing stores in Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States. The dot-C app is the first of its kind in Japan, and will allow Adastria customers to purchase secondhand clothing directly from their favorite staff member.

Adastria Group previously produced an online Staff Board which showed popular clothing store employees wearing outfits from across its fashion brands. This encouraged customers to buy the same "look" as the staff, who in turn became fashion influencers for the company. Over time, employees noticed demand from fans to buy their pre-worn clothing. This led Adastria to launch dot-C, which allows staff to sell their used clothing on an open marketplace.

"Staying ahead of changing consumer trends is a huge priority for Adastria Group. With dot-C, we're fundamentally changing buying habits, and it is important that the payment experience of our users in the app is equally innovative," said Megumi Kawamura, senior marketing manager at Adastria Group. "With Stripe, we were able to set up dot-C's online payments infrastructure in just three months."

Stripe Connect enables Adastria to embed Stripe's global payments platform directly into the dot-C marketplace, offloading all payments-related requirements onto Stripe, while keeping the customer experience fully dot-C branded. This means that Adastria staff members can safely and securely receive payment for the clothing they sell online. Dot-C uses Stripe Radar to detect and block fraud. Radar is powered by machine learning models trained on data across millions of global companies.

"The fashion industry is undergoing another wave of transformation as consumers become more conscientious about their buying habits," said Eileen O'Mara, chief revenue officer at Stripe. "With creative ingenuity, Adastria is changing how people buy clothes online and we're thrilled to play a part in its new business model."