Poshmark All Employee Email from Naver
CEO
From: SooYeon Choi, Naver CEO
To: All Poshmark Employees
Sent: October 5, 2022
Subject: Introduction to Naver
All,
It’s an honor to be reaching out to you today to share more about
our industry-defining combination. I want to begin by letting you
know that all of us at Naver have long admired the platform your
team has built and grown over the last decade – it’s truly
remarkable.
By now you’ve likely heard a little about Naver from Manish, but I
wanted to take this opportunity to provide you with a little more
background on us and share my excitement about the transaction and
what we can do together to create a new, global C2C shopping
experience.
Who is Naver?
We are Korea’s largest internet company and one of the country’s
clear market leaders in both search and e-commerce, a unique dual strength that
you won’t see elsewhere.
In Korea, Naver is the chosen platform for both searching and
shopping. Our platform is home to approximately 530,000 smartstores
– “sellers” – and generates more than 70% of online shopping
searches in South Korea.
Our success in the Korean market is in large part due to our deep
technology stack, which is something that we are excited to bring
to Poshmark as we work together to capture the enormous market
opportunities in our young and fast growing market.
Specifically, we have an established livestream shopping capability
that is the leader in the Korean market.
While I know Poshmark has its own livestreaming feature, we believe
that bringing the two together will accelerate the transformation
of the shopping and selling experience by allowing for further
social networking and engagement.
We are also excited to introduce our image recognition technology
that helps users identify where to find and buy products by
scanning objects and shopping through the camera on their
phone.
This technology, along with some of our other innovative solutions,
will make it easier to both identify new products and sell items,
allowing us to take the Poshmark user experience to the next
level.
Why Poshmark?
I have outlined some of the ways we hope to add value to the
Poshmark platform, but importantly we are excited by how you can
help us.
Poshmark is well known for its social marketplace and its loyal,
highly engaged community, and while we have built our own
communities, we know that Poshmark’s unique relationship-oriented
“micro” community creates a more customized and personalized
experience for its users.
One thing we particularly admire is Poshmark’s discovery-based
platform, something that we do not currently have at Naver.
While there are many strategic benefits to bringing together our
two companies, one of the most important attributes of this
transaction is allowing our respective teams to do what we do so
well – but with additional resources and greater market
know-how.