Emily
Gittins

Profile

The mathematician
who wants brands to
own their second act

The first question Emily Gittins kept getting was the one she never wanted to answer. Doesn't resale hurt full-price sales? Wouldn't a brand cannibalizing its own product be financial suicide? Four years and 50+ brand partnerships later, Archive has answered that question with data instead of argument: "We've debunked the concern that resale cannibalizes full-price sales."

Gittins co-founded Archive in February 2021, the month after she completed her MBA at Stanford. The timing was deliberate. Her thesis at Stanford's Graduate School of Business centered on the circular economy and fashion's environmental footprint - not as a cause, but as a market inefficiency. Hundreds of millions of pieces of apparel were leaving brands' hands after a single sale, with zero brand involvement in what came next. No data. No control. No revenue.

Her path to that conviction was circuitous in the best possible way. At Cambridge, she read Mathematics with First Class Honours, diving into applied mathematics, theoretical physics, quantum mechanics, and statistical physics. The kind of rigorous, pattern-obsessed thinking that doesn't announce itself but shows up quietly in how you model a marketplace or structure an algorithm.

After BCG London - where she advised consumer and technology clients as a strategy consultant - she detoured into policy work at GSMA, focused on mobile accessibility for women in developing countries. Then came Google X, Alphabet's moonshot factory, where she evaluated breakthrough climate technologies and worked on a stealth fashion concept. It was there that the scale of fashion's environmental problem became undeniable. The industry produces roughly 100 billion garments per year. Millions of tons end up in landfills. Gittins saw the waste not as an ethics problem but as a systems problem - one requiring infrastructure, not intention.

Building the plumbing for circular fashion

Archive isn't a secondhand marketplace you browse. It's the white-label technology that powers branded resale programs - the invisible infrastructure that makes The North Face's "Renewed" program run, that lets New Balance launch "Reconsidered," that gives Oscar de la Renta, Dr. Martens, Lululemon, and Peloton their own peer-to-peer secondhand channels. When a consumer lists a pre-loved jacket on a brand's own site, Archive is the engine underneath.

That positioning was a deliberate bet. The secondhand giant approach - building a ThredUp or a Poshmark - would have meant competing for supply, battling for consumer mindshare, and building a brand from scratch. Gittins instead bet on the infrastructure layer: give brands the tools to run resale themselves, where they control the experience, retain customer relationships, and own the data. It's the B2B bet, and it's paid off.

Archive's co-founder and CTO, Ryan Rowe, brought technical credibility that matched Gittins's strategy chops. Rowe had previously founded Kimono Labs - acquired by Palantir in 2016 - and spent two years as a Forward Deployed Engineer there before joining Gittins to build Archive. Their first hire class of 23 came from Palantir, Amazon, Afterpay, Patagonia, The RealReal, and Nike. The company wasn't assembled - it was recruited.

The funding arc

The early rounds came fast. An $8 million seed in Q1 2022, co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Bain Capital Ventures. A $15 million Series A in December 2022, again led by Lightspeed. Then the market softened. The 2023 fundraising climate for commerce tech was brutal. Archive kept building.

The February 2025 Series B told the story of a company that had earned its credibility. Energize Capital - a climate-focused fund - led the $30 million round, joined by Lightspeed, Bain Capital Ventures, G9 Ventures, Capital F, Woodline Partners, and Frontline Growth. The total funding now sits at $76.9 million. Energize Capital's involvement is a signal: Archive isn't just a resale SaaS play, it's climate infrastructure.

Where resale is heading - in-store

In 2025, Gittins has been pointing toward a frontier that might seem counterintuitive for a software company: physical retail. Her argument is that consumers increasingly want to drop off, browse, and buy secondhand in the same places they discovered the brand originally. DVF, Faherty, and M.M.LaFleur are already running in-store resale activations through Archive.

"Stores are branded resale's next frontier," she told Sourcing Journal in 2025. The logic tracks. Archive already has the brand relationships and the tech stack. Adding physical activation is less a pivot than an expansion of the same thesis: brand-owned, brand-controlled, brand-data-captured.

The Series B capital is also going toward global expansion - Archive launched UK operations in partnership with ACS (Advanced Clothing Solutions) and has designs on the broader European market, where fashion resale regulation is increasingly mandatory rather than optional. The EU's right-to-repair and extended producer responsibility directives are tailwinds Gittins has been positioning for since before they were headlines.

The recognitions keep coming

Forbes named Gittins to their 30 Under 30 list in 2023 (Retail & Ecommerce). Women's Wear Daily listed her among their Most Influential ESG Leaders the same year. In 2024, Vogue Business placed her on their 100 Innovators list. Fast Company ranked Archive #2 in retail on their 2024 Most Innovative Companies list, behind Walmart and alongside Erewhon - an unusual bracket that says something about the scale of Archive's ambitions. In 2025, Inc. named her to their Female Founders 500 list. She also took the SXSW stage in March 2025.

What the accolades reflect is less a company hitting milestones and more a set of ideas whose time has arrived. The resale market is on track to double by 2028. It's already growing at six times the rate of retail overall. Gittins's early conviction - that brands, not resale platforms, should own their customers' secondhand journey - is shifting from contrarian to consensus.

The mathematics of circular fashion

There's something fitting about a quantum mechanics graduate ending up here. Gittins talks about "resale intelligence" - using data from resale transactions to help brands understand item lifecycle, optimize pricing dynamically, and make better production decisions. The feedback loop from Archive's platform into a brand's upstream operations is where the real value may ultimately live. Not just resale as a revenue channel, but resale data as a way to build smarter products in the first place.

The resale market isn't a feel-good cause. It's a $43 billion industry projected to reach $82 billion by 2026. For brands that still see secondhand as a threat to their primary channel, Gittins has four years of transaction data and 50 brand case studies to say: you're solving the wrong problem.