Hi, I'm the founder of Secondsense: the Chrono24 of luxury handbags (it’s free lol).

Hi hi Reddit,

My name is Chris and I’m the founder of Secondsense.

Yes, this is a paid ad (saying that upfront because I know you'll figure it out anyway, and I'd rather just say it myself). I've been lurking/posting in these communities long before we built this thing and I think I know what an annoying Reddit ad looks like so cue my attempt to not be annoying.

I grew up in an immigrant family where just because something was cheaper that doesn’t mean it was a better deal. We wanted cheap relative to what it's actually worth. That distinction got drilled into me early.

As I got more into fashion and started consuming luxury, my brain kept doing the same thing it always did. How do I know this price is actually good? Not good in a vacuum, but good compared to the item’s fair market value.

I have a background in competitive dancing (random) and machine learning (nerd at heart) and at some point I just thought... why not apply ML towards bags and start a company. Screw job stability.

That's why I started Secondsense. We want to be the Chrono24 of luxury handbags.

When buying a watch on Chrono24, you can look up a reference number and see what each watch actually sold for. Not listed prices/blog post estimates, but real transactions. Trend lines, price history, etc,. It's genuinely useful because the data is honest and treats you like an adult.

That's what we're building for handbags. How?

At our core, we have a data lake of millions of actual sold prices across The RealReal, Fashionphile, eBay, Rebag, WGACA, Farfetch, Gilt, KOMEHYO, etc etc etc. We can then surface bags that are priced below what they historically sell for across the resale market. So if you're buying, you can actually tell when something is a deal and see the historical market data for that bag. We also run deeper dives for the data nerds among us, like whether color actually affects resale value or what would have happened if you'd treated different handbags like stocks (for fun, not financial advice… like srsly NOT financial advice).

But here's the part that's a bit tough. The handbag problem is a looooot harder than the watch problem.

Chrono24 built their index around 140 watch models. That sounds like a lot until you realize a watch reference number basically tells you everything you need to know. Same ref, same year, same condition, you're comparing apples to apples. The taxonomy is v manageable/clean.

Handbags are... not that. For example, a B30 can come in infinite colorways. Then factor in the leather types (togo, epsom, swift, chevre, box calf, barenia) and that's before you get anywhere near exotics. Then hardware: phw, ghw, bphw, rghw, bhw etc. Then condition grading that varies across platforms and sometimes across individual listers on the same platform. (Because you can’t compare the prices for pristine/like new conditions to those of poor/totally ran through conditions). Limited editions that don't map cleanly onto anything else. Blah blah list goes on.

It's a lot!!!! Haha!!!! Getting this right is the thing we've spent the most time on and I'm genuinely proud of where we've landed. But I'm not going to pretend we've fully solved it. The journey is loooooong and the data is messy in ways that take a long time to work through. We're still building.

Why I'm running this ad

1. We're in growth mode. We're a new company and Reddit is where our people are. Not going to dress that up as something else lol
2. I think what we've built is actually useful for this community and I want more of you to find it. We've been posting here organically for a while so just turning the volume up a bit.

The data shows what has happened, not what will happen. Anyone selling you certainty on future resale values is lying to you and we're not that kind of startup.

What comes next? If this sounds like your vibe, find us at secondsense.co

And if you have a theory, a question, a "but wait what about X," or a critique of our product, leave it in the comments. Can't stress enough how much we love to hear them. We read everything and we've genuinely built new features (like edits, market insights modals, SSO auth) out of things handbag lovers left in our comment sections.

That's all!! Chris xx