Business
How Poshmark Is Trying to Make Resale Work Again

Lauren Eager got into thrifting in high school. It was a way to find cheap, interesting clothes while not contributing to the wastefulness of fast fashion.
In 2015, in her first year of college, she downloaded the app for Poshmark, a kind of Instagram-meets-eBay resale platform. Soon, she was selling as well as buying clothes.
This was the golden age of online reselling. In addition to Poshmark, companies like ThredUp and Depop had sprung up, giving a second life to old clothes. In 2016, Facebook debuted Marketplace. Even Goodwill got into the action, starting a snazzy website.
The platforms tapped into two consumer trends: buying stuff online and the never-gets-old delight of snagging a gently used item for a fraction of the original cost. During the Covid-19 pandemic, as people cleaned out their closets, enthusiasm for reselling intensified. It was so strong that Poshmark decided to go public. On the day of its initial public offering in January 2021, the company’s market value peaked at $7.4 billion, roughly the same as PVH’s, the company that owns Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, at the time.
Then, the business of old clothes started to fray.
Using the Poshmark app, Ms. Eager and others said, started to feel like trying to find something in a messy closet. The app was cluttered with features that did not work or that she did not use, and it felt “spammy,” she said, sending too many push notifications.
Many platforms found selling used items hard to scale. Now, online resellers are trying to recalibrate. Last year, ThredUp decided to exit Europe and focus on selling in the United States. Trove, a company that helps brands like Canada Goose and Steve Madden resell their goods, purchased a competitor, Recurate. The RealReal, a luxury consignor, appointed a new chief executive as the company tried to improve profitability.
Poshmark is undergoing perhaps the biggest reinvention. In 2023, Naver, South Korea’s biggest search engine as well as an online marketplace, bought the company in a deal valued at $1.6 billion, less than half its IPO price.
Something of a mash-up of Google and Amazon, Naver is betting it can rebuild Poshmark, which has 130 million active users, with the same technology that made Naver dominant in its own country.
It may also help breathe new life into the resale market. Analysts think the resale fashion market still has room to grow in the United States, with revenue expected to increase 26 percent to $36.3 billion by 2028, according to the retail consultancy firm Coresight Research.
New legislation in California could help. The law, passed last year, requires brands and retailers that operate in the state and generate at least $1 million to set up a “producer responsibility organization” to collect and then reuse, repair or recycle its products. Resale platforms like ThredUp and Poshmark could be in a position to help brands carry out that mandate.
At the moment, though, Naver’s focus for Poshmark is more basic: Make it a better place to sell and shop. The company has the “operating know-how” to do that, said Philip Lee, a founder of the media outlet The Pickool, which covers both South Korean and U.S. tech companies.
“They’re trying to renovate Poshmark and then expand the market share,” he said.
A Marriage of Search and Commerce
Poshmark, which is based in Redwood City, Calif., was founded in 2011 by Manish Chandra, an entrepreneur and former tech executive, and three others. In trying to expand, Poshmark faced a problem common to resellers: Capturing the excitement of the secondhand-shopping treasure hunt while not frustrating buyers with an endless scroll. The company knew it needed better search, as well as interactive elements that gave people more reasons to come beyond paying $19 for a J. Crew sweater.
For its part, Naver was looking for ways to push beyond South Korea, where its commerce and search businesses were already mature. The growing online resale market in the United States presented an opportunity, and also gave the company access to the largest consumer market in the world.
“Commerce is a big growth engine for us,” Namsun Kim, Naver’s chief financial officer, said. And the peer-to-peer sector, where users sell to one another, was still in its infancy, with room to expand. But, Mr. Kim added, “it’s a more challenging segment, and that’s why it’s harder for a lot of the larger players to enter.”
There are two common business models for resale: peer-to-peer and consignment. With consignment, a platform collects and redistributes physical goods. Poshmark uses the peer-to-peer model, which relies on scores of people — many of them novices — haggling over prices and then mailing items to one another. This decentralization can be a headache for brands, which like to maintain a certain level of control of their products. And platforms like Poshmark must make buyers comfortable with trusting the sellers on their site.
Before the Naver purchase, it was difficult to push through needed technological changes, said Vanessa Wong, the vice president of product at Poshmark.
“I would always talk to my engineers and ask, ‘What if we do this or do that?’ They’re like, ‘That’s hard. The effort’s really high,’” Ms. Wong said.
Naver’s purchase offered both the investment and the expertise to pull off the changes. Founded in 1999, the company is everywhere in South Korea.
“We are not just a simple search technology or A.I. service,” said Soo-yeon Choi, the chief executive of Naver, whose headquarters are near Seoul. The company, she said, “alleviates the frustrations of people, which is what is needed to help growth.”
Search built Naver “into the massive power that they are in Korea,” said Mr. Chandra, who stayed on as chief executive after Naver’s purchase. It was the top priority when the company bought Poshmark.
Several new elements for users and sellers have been introduced. With a tool called Posh Lens, users can take a photo of an item and, using Naver’s machine-learning technology, the site populates listings that are the same or similar to the shoe or tank top that they’re searching for. A paid ad feature for sellers called “Promoted Closet,” pushes listings higher on customer feeds.
Poshmark also introduced live shows, some of which are themed, to draw in the TikTok generation and increase engagement. One party auctioned off clothing previously worn by South Korean celebrities, a connection that was made with the help of Naver.
Still, the resale market is going through growing pains and has not quite found its footing since the height of the pandemic. It’s not clear whether the changes taking place at Poshmark will be enough. In May, Mr. Kim, Naver’s finance chief, said in an earnings call that Poshmark’s profitability was improving, but by November, the company was cautioning that growth had slowed because of weakness in the peer-to-peer resale market in North America.
Missteps and Reinvention
The company has already done some backpedaling on unpopular decisions.
In October, Poshmark introduced a new fee structure, which increased costs for buyers. Sellers, fearing that higher costs would make consumers bolt, revolted. Within weeks, the company scrapped the new fee structure.
And there are still user headaches: tags and keywords that help users find what they’re looking for can be miscategorized. Sellers sometimes tag their products incorrectly to get more eyeballs on their less popular products. (Hard-to-offload Amazon leggings, for example, may be listed as Free People apparel.)
The company is beta testing changes with its frequent sellers — people like Alex Mahl, who sells thousands of dollars in apparel on the site each year. And within dedicated Facebook groups related to Poshmark, there’s a lot of chatter about the changes that sellers and buyers would still like to see.
“The only way for it to do well is there’s going to be constant changes,” Ms. Mahl said about the tweaks on Poshmark. “If you were just on an app that never changed — one, it would be boring, and two, the opportunity to just do better wouldn’t be there.”
One recent morning, Ms. Eager, the seller who joined Poshmark back in college, was pleasantly surprised to find that the app had some new features she actually liked. She snapped a photo of her Aerie gray tank top with Posh Lens. Within seconds, the app populated listings of similar products. It was so much better than conjuring up the adjectives needed to describe it.
“Love it,” Ms. Eager exclaimed.

Business
Paramount and YouTube TV extend deadline for a new carriage deal

Paramount Global and Google’s YouTube TV agreed to a short-term contract extension late Thursday, keeping CBS and other networks available as the two media companies worked to negotiate a new distribution agreement.
The eleventh-hour reprieve spared about 8 million YouTube TV customers from losing access to nearly two dozen networks, including BET, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon and TV Land. Broadcast stations KCBS-TV Channel 2 and KCAL-TV Channel 9 in Los Angeles also would have been dropped.
“We’ve reached a short term extension as we work toward a deal with Paramount to keep their content on YouTube TV,” YouTube said in a statement directed at users. “We appreciate your patience as we continued to negotiate on your behalf. We also value Paramount’s partnership and willingness to work towards an agreement.”
Clashes between programmers and distributors have become increasingly common in recent years. Pay-TV providers are motivated to control costs in an effort to attract and retain subscribers who have an abundance of viewing options.
At the same time, Paramount and other traditional Hollywood programmers are struggling to maintain their financial footing amid ratings declines and cable customer defections. They can ill afford cuts to one of their most important revenue streams: pay-TV distribution fees.
The current dispute centers on the fees Google must pay for the rights to carry Paramount channels.
“We’re fighting for an agreement that avoids passing along additional costs and offers you more flexibility in how you watch your favorite sports and shows,” YouTube said earlier this week in a blog post.
The negotiations come at a troubled time for New York-based Paramount.
CBS is separately sparring with Sony Pictures Television to retain distribution rights for Sony’s hugely popular game shows “Jeopardy!” and “Wheel of Fortune.” The company also is trying to fend off a $20-billion lawsuit filed by President Trump over edits made to a “60 Minutes” interview of former Vice President Kamala Harris last fall.
Paramount’s controlling shareholder Shari Redstone struck a deal last summer to sell the company her family has controlled for decades to David Ellison’s Skydance Media. The $8-billion deal has encountered turbulence at the Federal Communications Commission. The agency must sign off on the transfer of the CBS television licenses to Ellison for the deal to go forward.
Paramount’s cable channels, including Nickelodeon and MTV, have lost millions of subscribers amid a migration to video-on-demand streaming services such as Netflix. In August, Paramount took a $6-billion write-down to account for the declining value of its cable television portfolio and so it entered the negotiations with Google with a weaker hand.
“We have made a series of fair offers to continue our long-standing relationship with Google’s YouTube TV, providing subscribers access to the full array of Paramount’s entertainment, news and sports programming,” Paramount said Wednesday in a statement.
YouTube TV, which launched eight years ago, is hoping to sharpen its edge.
The service has quickly grown into a major player in television, appealing to younger viewers and sports fans. It has successfully plucked subscribers from the legacy cable- and satellite-TV providers.
YouTube TV is now the fourth-largest multichannel distributor in the U.S., behind Charter’s Spectrum, Comcast Xfinity and DirecTV, based in El Segundo.
The service made a big bet on sports when it took over the NFL’s “Sunday Ticket” offering in 2023 after that package became too expensive for DirecTV, the longtime rights-holder. However, the nearly $2-billion-a-year price for the Sunday afternoon NFL games drove up the cost of operating YouTube TV, prompting Google to scrutinize other contract costs.
YouTube TV’s fees also are on the rise.
Last month, the service hiked its charge to customers to $82.99 a month, up from $72.99 a month.
The company said it would offer YouTube TV customers an $8 credit a month “if we can’t reach an agreement and [Paramount] content is unavailable for an extended period of time,” Google said in a blog post.
Business
The Restaurant That Started Panda Express

This orange chicken has not been waiting for you on the steam table. It has not been bouncing and sweating in the darkness of a clamshell container while you wheel your luggage to the gate.
At Panda Inn, the Pasadena restaurant that started Panda Express, the orange chicken is made to order, strewed with whole dried chiles, scallions and a few threads of orange zest. It arrives craggy and glistening on a blue stoneware plate.
Is it good? Trick question! It is sticky, and it is familiar. It is relentlessly crunchy, with a flatly precise and habit-forming ratio of sweetness to acidity to heat. It is better, though not dramatically different from the one that waits on the steam table — always there, always waiting — but sometimes presentation can be everything.
Orange chicken, all dressed up, reminds me of when my parents set out cloth napkins and silverware while unpacking boxes of takeout, transferring everything to serving plates (yes, even pizza). I used to find this absolutely unhinged, but now I see it as a tender gesture that underscored the luxury of their taking the night off from cooking — they did it so rarely.
When the Cherng family opened Panda Inn in 1973, it was a popular Chinese restaurant that catered to the neighborhood. Early menus from the 1970s and ’80s included a bone-in tangerine-peel chicken, sizzling beef hot plates and a “Chinese Pasta” section of noodle dishes.
It was a nice, sit-down restaurant that also did a bit of takeout and catering. It appealed to local families, but also local developers, who asked the owners to come up with a restaurant concept for the expansion of the Glendale Galleria mall. That restaurant was Panda Express.
Panda Express developed its orange chicken in 1987 and, depending on whom you ask, the dish was either the natural evolution of tangerine-peel chicken or a lightning invention of Andy Kao, a chef for the chain. Either way, it helped to embed a sweet, crowd-pleasing idea of American Chinese cuisine into the global culinary consciousness, now deployed through 2,500 or so fast-food counters.
It also propelled the family’s small business into a privately held empire: Along with Panda Express, the group owns Uncle Tetsu, Hibachi-San and more, and the Cherng family has a net worth of more than $3 billion.
At the end of last year, the company completed a major renovation to the Panda Inn in Pasadena, with a red carpet that leads into a sprawling, glamorous, wood-paneled dining room. The ceilings are high and vaulted. There are lush pots of violet orchids at the host stand and bar.
The vibe would seem clubby if Panda Inn weren’t warm and welcoming, always peppered with shouty families celebrating birthdays and special occasions. On my most recent visit, an impeccably well-dressed man in his 70s enjoyed a multicourse meal on his own, while the two men next to me chatted in Armenian over beers, kung pao chicken and sushi.
Why is sushi on the menu? Because people love sushi, and because honey walnut shrimp was begging to be converted into a sloppy but delightful roll, but also because the restaurant’s founder and first chef, Ming-Tsai Cherng, lived and worked for some years in Yokohama’s Chinatown.
Why Taiwanese popcorn chicken and stone bowls of Taiwanese braised beef on rice? Because in the 1950s, Mr. Cherng worked as a chef at the Grand Hotel in Taipei, Taiwan.
You’re not thinking about all this as you sit down for a big meal at one of the round tables for 12, spinning the lazy susan with glee until the dish you want most is finally in front of you. But Panda Inn in Pasadena isn’t just a place for Panda Express superfans to come and pay their respects; it’s a devoted corporate flagship — a grand, Disneyfied spin through the family’s story that reframes this restaurant as proof of the American dream.
On the newly designed menu, there’s a photo of Ming-Tsai Cherng, born in Yangzhou, wearing a cook’s shirt and tossing food in a wok. Below, in a story about the immigrant family’s journey, Panda Inn describes itself as “a restaurant that embodies the pursuit of a better life for all.”
Such a frictionless story of the American dream seems fanciful if you so much as glance at the news, but it also doesn’t have much to do with why the dining room is consistently packed.
Even though Panda Express was never my go-to, the orange chicken will occasionally stand in for the fried and glazed thing that I genuinely long for, but can never have again: the sweet-and-sour pork at a restaurant called Peking Inn that once existed in suburban London.
For my ninth birthday, I asked my parents to make me that sweet-and-sour pork, along with the sweet corn and chicken egg-drop soup. We had just moved 300 miles away, to France, and I was still angry and depressed about it, but I didn’t know how to say all that.
Instead, I dared them to try and make me happy. I dared them to recreate a dish from my favorite Chinese restaurant (impossible!), one whose vast pleasures and disappointments are still hard-wired into my brain.
Those particulars are different for everyone, but they fill out the story behind Panda Inn’s greatest hits, embedded like core memories. On any given night, there’s an order of orange chicken on nearly every table — a dish that isn’t just tangled up in its own corporate mythologies, but tangled up in our own.
Business
Their grandfather came to America and opened a nursery. A century later, it's closing

For the better part of a century, generations of the Nakai family have kept the shelves at Hawthorne Nursery stocked with seeds and fertilizers, the lot outside full of fruit trees, potted plants and succulents.
The job, for the past many years, has fallen to Kei Nakai, 70, and his brother, David. But they will be the last. When the brothers retire at the end of the month, the 97-year-old nursery and, with it almost a century of family and local history, will go too.
“It’s time,” Nakai said.
Kei Nakai is shown in the garden center at Hawthorne Nursery.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The nursery dates to 1927, when it was started by Kei and David’s grandfather, Minegusu Nakai, who had emigrated from Japan to Vancouver, Canada, in 1898 and moved to Hawthorne after marrying. Today, it is one of the few remaining plant nurseries in the Los Angeles area that were opened by Japanese Americans before the U.S. entered World War II at the end of 1941. Shortly after, 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry living in the U.S., many of them citizens, were forced into incarceration camps under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. Taking what they could carry, they sold or left behind their homes, possessions and businesses.
To avoid being imprisoned in a camp, the Nakai family fled to work on a sugar beet farm in Colorado, according to the Los Angeles Conservancy. Another nursery owner in Gardena leased the property while they were gone and when they returned at the end of the war they purchased more land to expand the nursery into what it is today.
Kei Nakai says he’ll miss the most his parents’ home — a skinny, green two-story building that adjoins the nursery on Grevillea Avenue.
He pointed out his childhood bedroom window and said he wants to take a pane of glass and part of the old molding to make a commemorative frame before it’s bulldozed when they sell. He said he hopes the land is turned into something nice.

A scale from 1927 is among the items at Hawthorne Nursery in Hawthorne. There is so much “old stuff” everywhere, owner Kei Nakai says.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
There is so much “old stuff” everywhere, he said, it’s hard to decide what to keep and what to toss. Antique items are part of what’s left on display across the nursery’s walls: A scale that’s been there since the nursery opened. The ‘50s retro blue sign outside. A letter board above the register that reads, “Beautifying Hawthorne for 97 years. Enjoy the outdoors. Go gardening.”
A weathered train car used for storage — older than the nursery itself, he thinks — might go too, Nakai said. He isn’t sure where it came from or how old it is, though he remembers his father bringing it onto the property at some point. The conservancy expressed some interest it in, but he hasn’t heard anything in a while.
The closure isn’t for a lack of business, Nakai said. He declined to share revenue information but said the business was doing well and there’s been an additional boost since the closure — and sales to clear inventory — was announced.
Early on a recent Monday morning, the nursery was quiet other than an occasional phone call answered by his brother, David, in a back room. It was a far cry from the days during the COVID-19 pandemic, when South Bay residents were stuck at home and came looking for plants to cultivate and distract.
“This place was packed,” Nakai said. “It was never empty.”

Kei Nakai said he has been discussing retirement over the last 15 years and was just waiting for the right time.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
A man wheeled his baby boy into the store to ask when the doors will shut for good. “I love this place,” he told Nakai.
Kevin Baker, 45, frequented the shop when he first moved to the area from Pacific Palisades four years ago, drawn by the rare or interesting offerings not easily found at other nurseries, he said. He visited weekly, then monthly, then less frequently after his two children were born and his schedule got busier. “I’m glad I got to see it before it closed,” he said.
Nakai said he has been discussing retirement over the last 15 years and was just waiting for the right time. As a kid he worked for his parents in the shop and made 25 cents a day. When he graduated from UCLA in 1976 as an engineer, he said, government layoffs at the end of the Vietnam War meant he’d be jockeying for work right out of college. It made sense for him to take over the business instead.
His own children, now in their 30s, are happy with their own careers and have no interest in taking over, he said.

Memorabilia cover the walls of Hawthorne Nursery. The Nakai family “really did live, breathe and thrive in the plant world,” another nursery owner said.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The Nakai family brings a century of knowledge and skill to its horticulture work, said Russell Akiyama, a third- generation owner of the nearby Sunflower Farms Nursery in Torrance. “They really did live, breathe and thrive in the plant world,” he said.
Nakai spent time studying the Dudleya genus, succulents native to the West Coast, and contributed to its taxonomy, or scientific classification. In a presentation recorded in 1992 at the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden, a younger Nakai flips through pictures and describes different species of Dudleya plants.
And David Nakai “could make something grow out of a rock,” Akiyama joked. He recalled once seeing David propagating a flourishing flat of white wisteria, which is particularly hard to grow, and wondered how he’d managed to do it. And the nursery’s passion fruit, which Akiyama called “the best passion fruit you’ve ever tasted,” will live on in Sunflower Farms’ own collection, he said.
As Hawthorne Nursery prepares to close, Akiyama said he takes solace in seeing the influence the Nakai family and other Japanese American nursery owners have had when he drives through neighborhoods in Torrance, Gardena and other cities nearby and sees trees cultivated by the nursery owners decades ago.
“Our landscaping is just as much of a monument to who we are as our buildings,” he said. “There is no full, total goodbye. It’s just an, ‘I’ll see you later.’”
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