Move Loot’s Durham office opened last year as a test to see how the San Francisco startup’s full-service used furniture marketplace concept worked in smaller, less dense regions of the country.
The founders had an incentive—two are North Carolina natives and graduated from the University of North Carolina and they had friend Mike Althoff in town to serve as the local general manager. (Here’s the original ExitEvent story.)
Six months later, sales companywide are growing 40 percent month-over-month, with at faster rates in the Triangle. Althoff says thousands of pieces have been listed on Move Loot’s website and sold to new owners locally. The growth is faster than the first six months selling in San Francisco in late 2013 and early 2014. It helps that the company has more marketing power now—in February, it closed a $9 million funding round led by Metamorphic Ventures with participation by high-profile funds like First Round Capital, Index Ventures, Google Ventures and Y Combinator. The round brought the company’s funding total to nearly $12 million, and positioned it for further regional expansion.
Althoff has since added a team of five in Charlotte, where Move Loot began operating in November 2014, and just began serving Atlanta two weeks ago. But most of the magic still happens in a Durham warehouse where more than 20 people process, handle and list online furniture from all three regions. In this short film, we get inside the building where furniture is staged, photographed and stored before it’s sold and shipped out to new owners. Check it out:
