Quince Is King of the Dupes. Can It Be a Tech Giant, Too?

With a $10.1 billion valuation and recent legal wins, Quince’s leaders have their eyes on a bigger prize.

BY ISSIE LAPOWSKY @ISSIELAPOWSKY

Illustration: Inc.; Photo: Getty Images

Sid Gupta first pitched Hans Tung on his new business over a Zoom call in September 2021. At a glance, it was an unusual match. Tung was a managing partner at GGV Capital (now Notable Capital), a venture firm best known for investing in tech companies such as Airbnb and Anthropic. Gupta, meanwhile, was an ex-finance analyst and former CEO of two candy chains who had just launched a new company that sold $50 cashmere sweaters online.

But Gupta’s pitch wasn’t really about cashmere. It was about the underlying infrastructure that made it possible to sell cashmere for less. 

Unlike the spree of direct-to-consumer brands that popped up in the 2010s promising to cut out the middleman, Gupta wanted to slice more than the fat out of the supply chain. He wanted to eschew not just stores, but warehouses full of inventory as well, enabling manufacturers to ship directly to customers in a model he called “manufacturer-to-consumer.” Cashmere was a test case. If it worked, Gupta wanted to apply the model to all luxury products.

To Tung, it was a compelling thesis—particularly in that moment. The pandemic had wreaked havoc on the traditional retail supply chain, driving prices up. “The middle class worldwide is getting squeezed to varying degrees,” Tung says. He saw an enormous potential market in a company that could put a taste of the good life within reach of the average American.

The pitch was effective. If anything, Gupta was even a bit “too smooth,” Tung recalls. He was wary of falling too hard for another flash-in-the-pan DTC company, but he wrote Gupta a $50,000 personal check to see if he could deliver.

So far, at least, he has. Five years later, Gupta’s company, Quince, is fast-becoming a household name, famous and equally infamous for selling affordable dupes of high-end products, from cashmere sweaters and leather purses to linen couches and Royal Osetra Caviar. With its ubiquitous podcast promotions and Instagram ads (“Like Reformation, but $300 less”), Quince offers its customers Champagne tastes at Costco prices. 

The Bay Area-based company surpassed $1 billion in revenue last year and recently raised a $500 million Series E round, which valued it at $10.1 billion. That makes Quince an outlier in a year of spectacular flameouts among once-vaunted venture-backed consumer brands.

Quince has also been winning in court. A jury recently sided with Quince in a lawsuit filed by Deckers Brands over Quince’s Ugg-boot lookalikes. A week later, Tapestry, the company behind Coach, agreed to end its own lawsuit. Deckers and Tapestry did not reply to Inc.’s requests for comment.

Through these court battles, Quince has made itself out to be a David fighting the fashion industry’s Goliaths. “Our mission is to make exceptional quality accessible to everyone,” Joel Dion, head of legal at Quince, tells Inc. While Quince respects “valid intellectual property,” he adds, “competition should be won on product, quality, and real innovation. Where it is not, we will stand up for consumers.”

But Quince’s leaders have always aspired to be more than defenders of dupes; they want Quince to be seen as a tech company, one that is building a “new retail operating system,” the company’s chief merchandising officer, Matt Lippert, tells Inc. 

Quince is hardly the first consumer brand to dress itself up in the trappings of tech. To Sucharita Kodali, vice president and retail analyst for Forrester, Quince’s trajectory harkens to a frothier time in the DTC industry. “You raise a ton of money from venture capitalists or investors and trumpet a valuation,” she says, “but a valuation does not mean you’re consistently here for the long haul.” Quince declined to comment on whether it’s broken even.

The question now is whether Quince can live up to its lofty pitch and avoid the pitfalls of its predecessors, or whether it, too, will wind up relegated to the bargain bin.

Building a tech platform that scans sales data

One big difference........

© Inc.com