Good morning, everyone. Now presenting David Rosenblatt from 1stdibs.com.
Great. Thank you. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to learning about 1stDibs. Who is 1stDibs? 1stDibs is the world's leading marketplace for luxury, one-of-a-kind objects. Our mission, as it's written here, is to enrich lives with extraordinary design, we do something that's different than every other company in the world. There are lots of ways that I can illustrate that via facts and figures, which I will later in the presentation. Probably the simplest way to get across the uniqueness of who we are and what we do is with a story. That is, a couple of years into taking over the company, I got a cold email from the person who's known as DVF, stands for Diane von Furstenberg, the famous fashion designer. She emailed me and asked me to have lunch with her.
My background previous to 1stDibs is I ran a kind of ad tech company for many years. Sort of beyond that, basically, I sort of think of myself, and I am really a technology person. I responded to her and I said, "I'm flattered by the interest, but I'm not sure that you have the right David." I get mistaken for other Davids, especially bald ones, all the time. She said, "No, I know exactly who I'm emailing.
Come on over, I'll explain to you why I was interested in getting together." I did at the appointed time, at the end of the lunch, I asked her, "Why did you want to have lunch with me?" She had a great line that, again, I think sort of conveys to those of us who have not come from the design world the significance of this business. That is, she said, "Other than my own, the only websites that I truly love are Amazon and 1stDibs. I've met the guy who did Amazon, I just wanted to meet the person doing 1stDibs." I was very flattered to be put in that company. I think, again, from the perspective of our customer, the interior designer, the person who cares about design, that actually is representative of how they think of us.
All right. So we have a much longer history than most digital companies. We were founded in 2000 in the design district of Paris, which is called the Flea Market. The original idea was to put this physical marketplace online for the benefit of primarily U.S. interior designers who bought quite a bit from the sellers there. The founder is American. He moved the business shortly after its founding to New York, and between 2001, when he moved there, to 2011, ran the business very organically, meaning it looked more like a project than it did a company, certainly a digital or a technology company. In 2011, he took the company's first outside capital from Benchmark, the Silicon Valley investors, and I came in to replace the founder, Michael, in conjunction with that investment. Really, since then, our strategy has been consistent.
Before I joined, we were a listings business rather than a marketplace. Think craigslist as opposed to eBay. Sellers would list their products on the website with their contact information, and all contact between the buyer and seller thereafter would happen off-platform, and they paid a fee in exchange for the right to list. Our strategy, which we adopted shortly after I joined, was to convert that business into an e-commerce marketplace. Again, think craigslist to eBay. All checkout now is done on the platform. The two additional strategies were, one, to expand beyond its original focus on antiques, which is kind of the core product of the Paris Flea Market. Today, we're in a bunch of verticals. We'll talk about that. The third one has been to globalize the business.
At the time, we were almost entirely U.S.-based, despite the fact that we had been founded in Paris, on both the supply and the demand side. Those have been the three key kind of vectors of our development. Transactionalize the marketplace, globalize the marketplace, and leverage the trust that we gained as a byproduct of our first-mover advantage in furniture to sell other products that benefit from that trust. The last major development is in June of 2021, we went public on the back of the kind of post-COVID boom in e-commerce and home. In retrospect, if you map the luxury real estate market in the U.S., which is our primary end market demand driver, since June of 2021, that month was the literal peak of that market. Since then, the market has been in decline.
Both our GMV and our share price has tracked that, which, of course, now creates the entry opportunity. Okay. What exactly is it that we do? We're a classic inventory-light, two-sided marketplace. The supply side, which really is one of our key differentiators, is roughly 6,000 sellers of luxury design. That means all kinds of furniture, both new and secondary market furniture, jewelry, art, and fashion. The key difference between us and other marketplaces in this respect is that all of our sellers are vetted, and they're all professional. We don't take product from consumers, only from businesses. Mostly dealers, artisans, artists, art galleries, businesses like that. Those businesses have to apply. It's very difficult to get a kind of seat, if you like that, as it were, on the 1stDibs marketplace. You have to go through a whole process.
We vet the quality of the seller as a business, we vet the quality of the items that that business sells. Roughly half our sellers are outside the U.S., half are inside the U.S., but the average size of a U.S. seller is bigger, therefore, most of our inventory, or the majority of our inventory, not the overwhelming majority. I think it's roughly 60% of our inventory is located in the U.S. The demand side, in terms of GMV, is about 77.0% consumer, 30% professional buyer or interior designer. Interior designers are great buyers. They are to this market what media agencies are to the ad market, meaning they buy for a living. They are incredibly important to us, both economically and in terms of our brand and our relevance to our sellers.
On the consumer side, we deliver the high-end buyer to our seller, and that's a buyer that otherwise is very difficult to identify and to acquire. Think Diane von Furstenberg, people like that. The business model, as I mentioned, is asset-light, we take no inventory. We never touch it. We only facilitate orders, and that's reflected in a gross margin in the mid-70s. Most of our revenues, about three-quarters, are from commissions on the final sale of product. The waterfall is GMV and then revenue. Of revenue, 75% of revenue is from commissions, and the balance is from a combination of subscription fees. All sellers pay some monthly fee in exchange for the right to participate in the marketplace.
Also advertising, both endemic advertising, meaning ads that we sell to our sellers, and non-endemic advertising, ads that we sell to non-sellers who are interested in paying to reach our audience. Here are a couple of numbers to give you a sense of the scale of the business. Since inception, we have sold over $3 billion worth of product online across over a million orders. On an annual basis, as you can see here, it's about $360 of GMV, roughly $90 of revenue. I think other important numbers here, we have $10 billion worth based on the face value, list price times number of items of inventory on the marketplace, which kind of indicates the potential of what we have today without having to add additional inventory beyond that. Our gross margin is in the mid-70s, again, reflective of the asset-light nature of the marketplace.
That average order value I think is worth calling out, $2,750. By comparison, other marketplaces that are regarded as or describe themselves as luxury marketplaces like The RealReal, like FARFETCH, their AOVs are roughly in the $600-ish range. Our AOV is four times higher than other marketplaces that are commonly regarded as luxury. Let's see, what else? $0 of owned inventory, again, indicative of our asset-light nature. I mentioned the cumulative footprint that we've had in our industry since we changed the business model from listings to e-commerce. When I joined the business in 2011, 100% of the company was focused on furniture, mostly antique furniture. The basic strategy, I mentioned those three strategies of transactionalization, supply expansion or category expansion, and globalization. The kind of basic premise of category expansion is it's really hard to find online and acquire the buyer that we have.
That's the positive of the business. The challenge is that furniture is, unless you're an interior designer, in other words, on the consumer side of the business, is a relatively low-frequency purchase, right? It's not like, obviously, Uber or Airbnb even, or booking marketplaces like that. The idea behind category expansion is to take the cost of customer acquisition and amortize that across other verticals that require the same level of trust that we have in order to transact online. In fact, we've accomplished that. Today, 60% of our GMV is furniture versus the 100% around the time that Benchmark invested and I joined. This sort of gives you a quick feel for the range of product that we sell. Interestingly, we've had six orders of over a million dollars, including one recently, which was for an art piece. Again, these are online orders.
These are people finding the item on 1stDibs and checking out online, much in the same way that you would buy an iPhone or even a book from Amazon. In fact, one of the ways that I've always thought about our sort of positioning in our marketplace is the race for the $50 order is over, right? We know who won that, Amazon and Walmart. The race for the $5,000 order has yet to be won, but we feel like we're in pole position to do that, and we do feel that that marketplace, and we see it, is coming online as customers globally gain a higher and higher comfort level with transacting at all price points online. In terms of what we're focused on, we regard ourselves as a real digital technology company, despite the products that we traffic in.
My own point of view from having worked on the internet over 30 years is that the best companies in every category are technology companies, and the best technology companies are product-driven. We are too. 50% of our headcount is in product and engineering. This is the kind of stuff that they're focused on. Rather than walk you through each bullet point of our roadmap, I'll sort of abstract it and say a couple of things. One is, what this is focused on is really sort of the core, what's called in the internet industry, primitives, or sort of the atomic unit of our business, right? Transacting as efficiently with as little friction as possible. These four areas describe the kind of core elements of that atomic unit.
The second thing I would say is that AI is really a game changer for us in a very positive way. Each of these four areas is driven by AI, we are doing things in them that would not have been possible without AI. These are things that fundamentally transform the purchase experience and make it better online than it is offline. I'll give you just two super quick examples of recent wins that we've had across this roadmap. One is in terms of discovery. As we all know, search is probably the single most important kind of buyer or just human activity online. In our case, search is especially challenging because we're a so-called long-tail marketplace, meaning we have 2 million mostly unique items. Again, these aren't pairs of socks.
These are items that typically require, from a technology point of view, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12 words to describe. What that means is people often don't have a great ability to describe exactly what they're looking for with exactly the right terminology. As a result of that, we had what was called a null search results problem, right? Meaning people would look for something, and because they didn't get the terminology right, we weren't able to match that query with items on the marketplace, and so we returned zero results. We recently used AI, machine learning, to expand our ability to try to figure out what people really mean when they search for something but don't get those words right.
By doing that, we reduced the number of null, the percentage of search queries that result in what's called null search results, meaning you search for something and you get nothing back, by 25%. Search is the core sort of portal or process that buyers go through to find things. Another kind of second example is shipping. Shipping is a big source of friction in any furniture sale on or offline. One of the biggest drivers of shipping is the ability to tell buyers what something will cost in advance of their buying the product. That sounds very simple and obvious in the context of most of our e-commerce experiences, right? If you went to Amazon and there's no way to know what something costs to ship in advance of buying it would strike you as ridiculous.
However, that is the common experience in furniture marketplaces because it's very often very difficult to quote those shipping costs in advance of knowing exactly what the dimensions of the item are, where the buyer and the seller are relative to each other, supply-demand of carriers at that moment in time, and so on. We were able to use machine learning models just recently, a couple of weeks ago, to be able to start predicting what that shipping quote would be with a very high degree of accuracy before people indicated interest, which again, is extraordinarily important as a way of driving conversion. These are some of the things that we love about the business. I'll just call out two things, the two things that I think are the most important. One is we have a brand that stands for luxury and safety and security.
That's what gives us the buyer permission and seller permission to be able to transact at such high average order values. The second one is the durable two-sided network effect characteristic of our business. When you look at almost every vertical on the internet, most of them tend to be led by one company, right? LinkedIn to recruiting, DoorDash in delivery, and on and on and on. The reason for that, the reason why there's typically only one or two players, is because of the network effect. Once these companies have accomplished a network effect, it's very difficult to compete against, and every single new buyer and every single new seller adds to the, enhances both the buyer and the seller experience. The bigger these companies are, the better the experience is, which again, is what makes it very difficult to compete with.
We have that in our category. Lastly, certainly not least in terms of financial performance, probably the most important thing here is in Q4 of last year, 2025, we had our first ever adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow positive quarter. We have committed that we will achieve that for the full year this year, and we're on track to do so. Given the asset-light nature of the business, also the fact that we have a very low dependence on customer acquisition, on paid advertising, the flow-through is very high. Our operating leverage is very high. Our contribution margins, for example, are 65%. We are kind of fully committed to and expect that to continue.
The sort of inflection point in that was Q4 last year and full year this year, our first full year of adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow positivity. Okay, I'm done. Any questions? The question is, what's the competitive landscape? There are a lot of companies that are substitutes for what we do. There's no company that does what we do. You could walk into Tiffany's and buy a necklace, or you could buy a kind of special, either vintage or individually designed piece from 1stDibs. That's typically the competition. Beyond that, we have a small number of much smaller vertical-specific, meaning point player competitors. There are companies that are marketplaces only for vintage furniture, and the same in art and so on, but there's no multi-category luxury digital marketplace.
Is each SKU then one-off?
Most, almost all are one-off. One of a kind.
Is the seller then annotating the site?
The seller is responsible for all item descriptions, photography, and so on. Yet another AI opportunity, which we're doing, is to do that for them. We've started that process. We have an AI product that automates the creation of item titles, you can imagine that that only gets bigger and better over time.
What's going to drive top line growth?
Yeah. Two things, couple things, actually, three. Three primary. One is in Q4 of last year, we cut paid spend by 50%, paid advertising by 50%. We did that after extensive testing. That had the impact of only reducing GMV by 5%. GMV was negative 5% in last Q4 and Q1 as well, which is a great trade if you think about it. We cut paid spend by 50% and only had a reduction in GMV of 5%. Number one is we're going to start lapping that for the full quarter in Q4 of this year. That's a big tailwind. The second is, and I think most important in the long run, is we feel like we have a really, really good product roadmap. We brought on board a new head of product and marketing, Bradford, who's here with us today.
Who's got many years of marketplace experience. He brought with him a roadmap, which we feel is targeted at exactly the kind of highest leverage parts of the buyer and seller experience. That roadmap is already producing results. There's, of course, a compounding effect to roadmaps. Each quarter it gets better and better. We're very confident in resuming growth, even in the absence of a market rebound. However, the last and ultimately the most significant thing will be when the market comes back. It is a when, not an if, right? This is not a market like linear TV that's in secular decline. What do people do when they make money? They buy better houses. What do they do when they buy better houses? They want to make it look as good as possible. They hire a designer, or they buy product themselves.
We have optionality on other markets as well, like jewelry and art and so on. We've got these kind of three tailwinds, two of which are pretty much locked in, the third of which I think is just a matter of time. Yeah.
What is your cash burn rate, and what needs to change for you to become cash flow positive?
Yeah. We are free cash flow and adjusted EBITDA positive as of Q4 last year, 2025, and we've committed to maintaining that for the full year. Again, the sort of financially exciting or compelling dimension of this marketplace is, like many other asset-light marketplaces, we have very high operating leverage. Once we are able to achieve revenue growth, we have very high flow-through of that revenue to EBITDA. Again, probably the easiest way to think about that is 65% contribution margins.
What do you plan to do with the $95 million in cash?
Yeah. We came out of our IPO actually with $135 million in cash. I think we ended last quarter with $85 million, not $95 million. Most of that reduction has been via stock buybacks. We've bought back $40 million of stock, and we announced a fresh $10 million buyback at the end of last quarter. Yeah.
You mentioned a lot on investing in the platform and AI. You've also done pretty recent planning on cutting your operating expenses and marketing spend there. Just curious if you have any commentary on how those investments are going to change the operating profile, either short term or long term. We expect a lot of efficiencies from that and the little class cost structure scale.
Yeah. In the first part of your question, absolutely. One of the things that Bradford engineered, actually, shortly after he started, was a reduction in our marketing investment in total, both headcount and non-headcount related. We also actually added engineers at that time. We sort of changed the internal balance of our investment distribution. Yeah, the reason why we did it is because the best kind of top-line growth is product driven. It's sustainable, it's higher margin, and it also creates a competitive advantage. We're already seeing the benefit of that more robust product roadmap. Again, as I said, the impact of product roadmaps compounds over time, right? We expect to see that as well. Okay, thank you very much. Appreciate your interest, and we'll be around.