Beni: The Ultimate Virtual Thrifting Assistant
When it feels like fast fashion and microtrends are dominating the affordable clothing market and premium brands aren’t in your budget, thrifting can be a great way to combine ethical consumption with quality items that won’t disintegrate in your washing machine or break the bank. But, thrifting can also take a lot of time and feel overwhelming, especially when you’re on the hunt for one very specific item. Is inconvenience just something we have to accept as a necessary cost to be able to thrift?
Beni, a revolutionary fashion tech company and aggregator, certainly doesn’t think so. Beni allows you to search the internet for secondhand items all in one platform. You can use their app to search for items, or use their browser extension while shopping on other websites to see if the items you’re looking at, or something similar, are available for purchase secondhand. In the words of creator and former CEO Sarah Pinner, “The whole kind of ethos is to create more intentionality around shopping and help people to find the styles that they want in maybe a more sustainable, affordable, and unique way.”
The inception of Beni goes back to 2020, however Pinner’s passion for sustainability spans decades. As a kid growing up in Santa Barbara, she was passionate about waste reduction and protecting the nature she grew up in. This interest fueled Pinner as she worked in the Food and Agriculture industry, including her year working at Imperfect Foods, and as she spent the last decade primarily shopping secondhand both in person and online. “If there’s an opportunity to reduce waste and keep things in circulation, I’m always very excited about that.”
When Pinner started her first year of her dual grad program in business school in 2020, during the pandemic, she relied on online methods for secondhand shopping. Her friends who wanted to thrift online, but had no idea where to start, would turn to her for advice. ‘I just found a lot of my friends would say something like, “I know I should buy secondhand, but I just don’t.”’ This action gap fascinated Pinner and when she dug deeper she discovered the disconnect was caused by people not wanting to learn a new way of shopping.
Pinner’s creative problem solving brain pushes her to see problems like this from a design challenge perspective. Her expertise and experience in the sustainability and circular economy space allowed her to come into the fashion realm with the approach of changing behavior by “making the sustainable solution really convenient, attractive, and affordable to everyday people.” “The idea with Beni is, let’s allow people to shop as they normally would, in ways they’re comfortable with, but find those secondhand items for them to purchase and really make the behavior change as easy as possible.”
Pinner spent 2020 diving deep into the initial phases of Beni, testing mock-ups and building the browser extension. At the beginning of 2021, Celine Lightfoot, Beni’s current CTO, came in as the technical side to solve problems like finding a way to present varied and poor quality data in an accessible way. After all, how do you begin to display such varied inventory when there’s usually one of each item and sizing information isn’t consistent? Then Kate Sanner, current CEO, joined the team as CMO to assist with Beni’s issues as a consumer product. ‘Everybody who was involved with Beni, especially in the early days, it was kind of serendipitous in a way. We weren’t coming into it saying “We want to start a company,” it was more, “This is an interesting idea, could we do this?”’
As Beni’s grown over the years other companies have emerged, competition Pinner welcomes, and yet Beni has consistently managed to stay above and stand apart from its competition. Beni remains not only as the original, but as the aggregation tool with the largest database of online resale. Beni has been in this field the longest and has been able to curate longstanding relationships with major resale marketplaces, such as Poshmark, to gain direct access to their feed, allowing Beni to build a robust ingestion engine. This early access to major databases allowed Beni to focus on improving the shopping experience instead of worrying about making secondhand items available online.
Although Pinner has left Beni as its CEO, she remains connected as an advisor. But what lies ahead for her? Since stepping away from Beni and recovering from burnout she’s worked to set some boundaries between her personal identity and her career. “One thing I found when I was working at Beni is that I didn’t have a lot of mental space and energy to also be a conscious community member and consumer in my own life as much as I would want to be.” Her love for Beni is as strong as ever, but feels it’s time for her to support from the sidelines instead of being consumed by the mission. She still wants to work in the circulatory world and is working to answer the question of how community can fit into her work around climate. She’s also happy to have time to return to her creative roots with painting and dance.
Beni’s got exciting things on its horizon as well. In June 2025 Beni went through a rebranding, swapping it’s white lowercase letters for bolded black all caps and deep emerald green background for a bold acid yellow. Mary Korlin-Downs, Beni’s Creative and Product Design Director, explained the change in color palette, “We wanted something that spoke to both the greens, when you think green you think sustainability, but also something that kind of spoke to yellow, because when you think of yellow you think of slowing down, you think of slow fashion, and we wanted those colors to mix.”
This shift came from a desire to not only speak to Beni’s strong, existing sustainability audience, but also to people who don’t automatically think to shop secondhand. “We really want all people to think, to shop secondhand first, that’s kind of the core reason why Beni was started in the first place.” Moving forward Beni products will get a facelift in terms of design. The team is now working to update all the products to have “a really fresh, beautiful design that is super delightful and easy to use,” something you’ll enjoy exploring and find yourself revisiting.
In the last year Beni has been quickly evolving and expanding through additions like shopbeni.com and building out the app. “We talk about the future of Beni, I truly think it lives in the app as a discovery platform. People look to Pinterest to look at styles and aesthetics and something that’s aspirational and Beni kind of wants to bring that to the secondhand market.” Beni has a headstart compared to its competitors, Korlin-Downs even says Beni’s image search is better than Google or any other search engine in finding secondhand items. With its superior tech and passionate team, Korlin-Downs knows Beni’s rebranding is just the beginning of their bright future.