Fresh off the heels of the news that Thrillist had raised a $13 million Series A, its men’s clothing retailer, JackThreads, announced exclusively to Betabeat today that it has hit one million orders.
“Our growth has been insane,” said Devon Giddon, Thrillist’s director of communications. “In 2010, we were processing approximately 8,000 orders a month and now we’re doing around 13,000 orders a week! And 60 percent of those orders are from repeat buyers.”
Back in August when Thrillist CEO Ben Lerer and team announced that they’d raised $13 million after seven straight years of solid bootstrapping, Mr. Lerer told Betabeat that a significant chunk of the funding would be used to build out Thrillist’s ecommerce arm, JackThreads.
“It’s sort of unbelievable how quickly this thing is scaling,” Mr. Lerer told us by email this morning. “JackThreads brand has clearly struck a chord and this milestone is proof that media companies can sell products to readers with an honest and focused approach. I’m pretty sure JackThreads will be the largest company on earth soon.”
Mr. Lerer intends to hit that sweet spot between media and ecommerce, and JackThreads is integral to realizing that vision. Acquired by Thrillist in 2010, the members-only men’s online clothing retailer has since spawned two in-house labels, including Goodale, launched in April.
The two in-house brands are the highest sellers on JackThreads, Mr. Lerer told us back in August. “We’ll continue to lean into private label,” he said, just after the Series A announcement. “We’re seeing that we’re really good at creating merch and we understand what our guys want. I don’t see any reason why next year we couldn’t have 10 to 20 private label brands that we own and operate in 20 different categories. It differentiates us from other people in the marketplace.”
With an impressive growth trajectory and one million orders on the books, expect a few more private labels to roll out in the coming months. We just have one question: how are the Jills handling all this success?
