Online resale giant 1stDibs has appointed chief product and <a href="https://bitcomme.com/whats-going-on-with-the-stock-market-consider-this-from-npr/” title=”What’s going on with the stock market? : Consider This from NPR”>marketing officer Bradford Shellhammer as CEO, effective January 1, 2027. David Rosenblatt, who has held the role since 2011, will transition to executive chair of the company’s corporate board.
“When David hired me, this was not the plan, but I told him I had genuine interest in the role when the time was right,” Shellhammer tells Business of Home. “About six months ago, he said, ‘I think the time is right. You’ve changed the culture of the company, and the roadmap that you built is starting to show results. … Let’s capitalize on this moment.’”
Shellhammer, who will also become a member of the board in January, has been with the company since last year, but has made waves during a relatively short tenure. He has looked to reset the company’s relationship with its sellers, rolling back policies that kept their identity obscured on the platform and lowering commissions on some categories. He has also reinvented 1stDibs’s presence on social media, shifting toward informal vertical video content, often featuring dealers.
The executive’s background is a unique split between design and tech. Earlier in his career, Shellhammer dabbled as a decorator, wrote for Dwell, and did stints at both Design Within Reach and Blu Dot. Then an e-commerce startup that he co-founded, the digital marketplace Fab.com, took off and launched him into the tech world, leading to roles at eBay, Reverb and Rent the Runway. He’s also an avid art and antiques collector.
“I come from this world, I know these people, I collect this stuff, and I worked at the biggest marketplaces in the world,” says Shellhammer. “In me, you get both the entrepreneur and someone who has scaled actual marketplace business. You get the collector as well as the technologist.”
“I could probably only be the CEO of this company,” he adds with a laugh.
Shellhammer will step into the role at a pivotal moment for 1stDibs. In recent years, Rosenblatt cut costs amid a post-pandemic slump for the broader home industry. The belt-tightening, combined with moderate revenue growth, helped the company reach adjusted EBITDA profitability since the end of the last fiscal year. However, 1stDibs has yet to turn a net profit as a public company, and the stock’s performance has been mostly flat since 2022.
Shellhammer’s plan for growth is three-pronged: He’s looking to target the “next generation of connoisseurs” to keep the site relevant to a younger audience; improve its digital infrastructure to ease transactions and UX; and expand 1stDibs’s inventory, especially in targeted categories, starting with jewelry, watches and handbags.
“We need to demystify the space—resale, vintage, antiques—invite more people in, and strike a nerve with a new collector class,” says Shellhammer. “If we can [do that], fix the core business, and fuel more inventory, that’s the secret sauce.”
Designers, Shellhammer says, will always be a core customer, and his plan for the trade is simply to focus on service. “They know what they’re coming to 1stDibs for. The real opportunity is to service them, not try to sell them,” he explains. “I’ve been with a lot of our interior designers … and they all say the same thing: When something breaks or something delays, take care of it. … All of that stuff is really hard and really manual, and I need to make their lives easier, not harder.”
The changing of the guard is a significant shift for the industry’s largest vintage and antiques resale platform, which, since its launch in 2000, has had essentially only two leaders. Founder Michael Bruno got the company off of the ground and, in the early days of e-commerce, proved that high-priced one-of-a-kind pieces could be sold online. Rosenblatt brought 1stDibs into its next era, transforming the business from a listings platform into a transactional site and stewarding it through its 2021 IPO.
Though some of the changes Rosenblatt made to the site proved unpopular with its dealers, he grew its scale and reach, bringing the platform to a global audience and expanding into jewelry, watches and art—as well as new and custom pieces. He remains 1stDibs’s largest individual shareholder.
“When I joined, we were a niche listings site, mostly domestic and mostly focused on vintage and antique furniture,” said Rosenblatt in a statement accompanying the news. “We made the leap to become a transactional marketplace, have become fully global and established a strong presence in additional verticals. It has been an honor to lead 1stDibs for the last 15 years.”
