The Client: Vestiaire Collective

Vestiaire Collective operates a global C2C marketplace for pre‑loved luxury fashion, connecting buyers and sellers of authenticated designer items. The platform serves fashion‑forward consumers who care about sustainability as much as style, and it relies on strong engagement loops — discovery, saving, and returning — to drive repeat usage and revenue.

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The Mission: Marketplace Engagement Product Manager

Product People joined Vestiaire Collective’s Buyer and Seller Profile and Notification team as an interim Product Manager to tackle a critical business problem: declining engagement in key discovery features that underpin Monthly Active Members (MAM). Reporting into the CTPO and partnering closely with design, data, and engineering, we were asked to quickly stabilise performance, identify what truly moved the needle, and leave behind a prioritised roadmap the team could execute on after our mission ended.

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Our Main Quest: Reviving Marketplace Engagement

Launch: Onboarded Very Fast

Within days, we were fully embedded: we absorbed existing analysis from the Data Product Analyst, reviewed Saved Searches and Favorites together with the VP Design, and aligned with the Engineering Manager on system constraints and opportunities. This rapid onboarding meant we could start reshaping the engagement strategy almost immediately, instead of spending weeks ramping up.

Explore and Conquer: Diagnosing Engagement Decline

Problem: Vestiaire Collective had seen worrying downward trends in core engagement mechanisms such as Saved Searches and Favorites. Top buyers often had large collections of favorites but no effective way to organise them, and the experience around notifications was noisy and overwhelming. Together, these issues created friction in the journey from first discovery to repeat purchase and put pressure on MAM, a core health metric directly tied to liquidity and GMV.

What we did:

• Reframed Saved Searches as a strategic retention lever, not just a utility feature, and built a concrete strategy to improve its UX, functionality, and measurability using the client’s own terminology and constraints.
• Introduced a structured experimentation approach by defining and launching a fake door test for notification controls, validating that users actively wanted more control before committing engineering budget.
• Shipped practical UX and CX improvements such as sorting capabilities for saved searches with proper multilingual translations, reducing friction for power users with hundreds of items saved.
• Reduced notification pressure with better design and governance, co‑creating notification control concepts and frameworks that respond to user feedback about overload instead of adding more noise.
• Prioritised work with a RICE‑based CX enhancement funnel, so leadership could clearly see which improvements had the highest impact on engagement and how they laddered up to MAM.

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Initiative 1 – Saved Searches as an Engagement Engine

Problem: Saved Searches usage and related discovery features were losing momentum, and the team lacked clear visibility into which improvements would actually move MAM.

What we did:

• Defined a focused set of improvements to make Saved Searches a repeat‑visit driver rather than a passive feature.
• Partnered with design and data to ensure each change could be tracked via concrete indicators (for example, new data points on saved searches for later optimisation).
• Used RICE scoring to make trade‑offs explicit and help leadership sign off on a phased roadmap instead of one‑off tickets.

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Initiative 2 – Fake Door Experiment for Notification Controls

Problem: Users were receiving 4–6 emails and up to 20 in‑app notifications without clear controls or preferences, creating frustration and churn risk. The team believed “we need controls”, but lacked hard evidence on whether users would engage with them or which options mattered most.

What we did:

• Designed and launched a fake door test to measure real user appetite for notification settings before committing full engineering investment.
• Turned stakeholder intuition into a clear experiment design with explicit hypotheses, success criteria, and tracking.
• Used experiment results to materially reduce product and delivery risk, creating decision clarity on if and how to expand notification controls.
• Fed learnings back into the Saved Searches and engagement roadmap so future investments were evidence‑led rather than opinion‑led.

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Initiative 3 – UX & CX Improvements for Power Users

Problem: Power users with large collections of saved items (hundreds of favorites) had no way to organize or efficiently navigate their collections, creating friction in the discovery-to-purchase journey and limiting repeat engagement.

What we did:

• Shipped sorting capabilities for saved searches with proper multilingual translations, addressing a key pain point for international power users.
• Identified and prioritized practical UX improvements that reduced friction without requiring major engineering investment.
• Ensured each improvement was scoped to deliver measurable impact on user retention and engagement metrics.
• Balanced quick wins with longer-term structural improvements to maintain momentum while building toward sustainable engagement growth.

This keeps the RICE prioritization framework in the Mini-Missions section (avoiding repetition) while giving proper depth to the concrete UX/CX work that was shipped.

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Mini‑Missions: Our Side Quests

• CX enhancements RICE framework: Introduced a transparent, repeatable prioritisation method so product and leadership could debate trade‑offs using the same numbers and assumptions.
• KPI ownership documentation: Cleaned up and maintained KPI ownership documentation so teams know who is responsible for which metrics, supporting clearer decision‑making around engagement initiatives.
• Loyalty & retention opportunity scan: Ran extensive desk research and competitor teardown on loyalty programs across fashion and adjacent verticals, mapping mechanics (tiers, credits, subscription, gamification) to Vestiaire’s business model. Distilled this into concrete opportunity areas the team can explore in future.

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Mission Achievements: Delivered Outcomes

📊 Strengthened the link between Saved Searches, Favorites, and Monthly Active Members (MAM) by reframing engagement work into a clear, measurable backlog instead of isolated feature tweaks.

🧪 Validated demand for notification controls with a fake door experiment, de‑risking future investment by proving that users actively seek more control over how and when they are contacted.

🧭 Aligned design, data, CRM, and engineering on a single prioritisation framework (RICE) so that engagement improvements could be sequenced based on impact, confidence, and effort rather than opinion.

🤝 Left Vestiaire Collective with a shared language, clear documentation, and ownership around engagement KPIs, making it easier for the internal team to continue executing after hiring their FTE PM.