Image via CrunchBase
Lifestyle magazines rarely have a section in them for swaps. Gadget marketing is also light on what to do with your device once you feel it’s overstayed its welcome. When that shiny object is not so shiny. When you’d really rather get an Apple or a Samsung instead of that beat up ASUS you stitched together. But let’s face it branding any object is about creating a shared identity between customer and product. You expect a product to be sticky, to hang around with its owner. Swapping, though, is a potential megatrend.
Jeff Bennett at swap.com has a community of 450,000 people who want to swap and he plans to take it global. He began with swapping books.
That reminds me that books have a noble heritage in the sharing economy. Libraries are monuments to sharing culture, pre-all round wealth improvement and the eBook. But that’s not exactly swapping. And second hand bookshops that buy in paperbacks and sell them on at a margin are a form of sharing but they too are not swaps.
So Jeff’s plan to take swapping into all kinds of product areas and all kinds of countries strikes me as a special kind of challenge.
He recently acquired an events company so he can mix online swapping with real life swapping events. “Tens of millions of people swap,” he says. “We want to be the platform of choice for that fragmented activity.” Swap.com has 14,000 local swapping communities along with the events arm to make swapping easy.
I assume swapping is driven by recession?
Not so. Or not only. Recession is giving it momentum but Jeff’s research suggests swapping is happening anyway.
“The dynamic is access versus ownership, and that’s an emerging tenet for consumers, it is a bigger driver than recession. People have acquired many many items during that period when it was easy to get them. Millennials in particular have a strong driver here. How can I get what I need without buying it.”
Jeff’s ambition is to make swapping as ubiquitous as purchasing. To that end the swap.com platform does not charge its users – the business model is based around advertising, and taking a cut from support services like delivery.
What technology brings to the mix is an ability to better match people who want to swap. Value lies in aligning your needs with those of exactly the right person with the right product and the right mix of wear and tear. Technology is getting very good at pair matching.
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