Move Loot

» see moveloot.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Selling a used sofa is an unpleasant problem with an obvious software answer and a brutal physical one. The software answer is a listing page. The physical answer is that somebody has to get the sofa out of a third-floor apartment, store it somewhere dry until a buyer appears, and then get it up a different staircase. Move Loot's insight was that the second half is the actual business, so they did it themselves: you listed the furniture, they came and took it away, and it sat in their warehouse until it sold.

Four friends started it in San Francisco in 2013, doing the pickups and the deliveries personally out of a single storage unit. That got them into Y Combinator's Winter 2014 batch, and from there the money arrived quickly. First Round, Index Ventures and Google Ventures were among the investors, and the total reached $21.8 million by November 2015. The service spread from the Bay Area into New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Charlotte and the Raleigh-Durham triangle.

Their own farewell letter is the best summary of what they were aiming at, and it reads like people who meant it: a national community of furniture lovers and recyclers, thousands of tons diverted from landfill. That last part holds up. Secondhand furniture mostly gets thrown out because moving it is harder than replacing it, and a company that solves the moving solves the throwing out.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the heavy part ~

The unit economics of this are visible from across the room. A marketplace earns a percentage of the sale price, and used furniture sells cheap. Against that percentage you are paying for a truck, two people strong enough to carry a wardrobe, fuel, insurance, and square footage in warehouses near expensive cities. The commission on a $200 couch does not cover one flight of stairs, let alone the month it spent in storage waiting for a buyer.

They knew this and kept rebuilding the model to escape it. The delivery and pickup structure changed repeatedly, there was a period of offering general moving services, and the company tried pushing more of the handling back onto sellers. Each revision was an attempt to keep the marketplace's reach without owning the logistics, and none of them worked, because the logistics were the reason anyone used it.

~ the cracks ~

By early 2016 the cracks were in the customer reviews rather than the press. Listings were being rejected, and furniture was sold and then not delivered. Those are the symptoms of a company rationing the expensive half of its own service, and anybody who had watched an on-demand startup die before could read them.

~ what replaced it ~

On 29 June 2016 the homepage was replaced by a letter that opened "Dear Move Loot Customers and Friends" and said the marketplace was coming to an end as of that day. The sign-off was a partnership with Handy, the home services company, which bought the customer list and offered everyone a free hour of cleaning or assembly with the code MOVELOOT. A furniture marketplace ending as a discount coupon for someone else's cleaners is a plain accounting of what was left worth selling.

Wikipedia records the shutdown as July 2016, which is a month late. The TechCrunch report, five separate Hacker News submissions and the archived letter itself all land on 29 June. What Move Loot proved is something the resale economy spent another decade confirming: the listing was never the hard part, and every company that has since tried to make secondhand furniture liquid has had to decide, the same way these four did, whether it is willing to own the truck.

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