Rethread

School uniforms in Australia are expensive, and most families end up with bags of outgrown items they don't know what to do with. The second-hand market existed informally — Facebook groups, school noticeboards, car boot sales — but there was no dedicated, trustworthy platform for it.

Building a marketplace is technically harder than building a standard e-commerce store. You have two sides to manage: buyers and sellers. Payments need to flow correctly across multiple parties. Sellers need to be paid out reliably. Schools, as a distinct seller type, needed their own payment infrastructure. And the discovery problem — finding the right uniform for your specific school, in the right size — needed a proper solution, not a search box.

We built the full marketplace stack from scratch:

Discovery and filtering: Every Australian school is catalogued with state, suburb, and enabled status. Parents filter by school first, then size, category (blazer, shorts, dress, etc.), condition, and gender. Saved searches trigger email alerts via Klaviyo the moment a matching listing is created — so parents aren't manually checking back.

Multi-seller checkout: A single cart can contain items from multiple sellers. At checkout, the platform splits the order into child orders per seller, calculates the Stripe transaction fee per split, tracks individual payout eligibility, and ensures each seller's net amount is correct. Everything is stored in cents to avoid floating-point rounding errors.

Two payout models running in parallel: Individual sellers (parents) are paid via ABA file — the Australian standard for bulk bank transfers. The admin panel generates the file based on which payouts are due, and it's imported directly into online banking. No manual data entry, no transcription errors.

Schools sell first-hand uniforms and connect via Stripe Connect. When a school's item sells, Stripe handles the payout automatically at checkout — no admin intervention required, no ABA file needed.

Payout eligibility logic: Payouts aren't instant. Orders must reach a completed state, items must be dispatched, and a two-week hold window applies to protect buyers. The platform tracks all of this per order and per item, surfacing only genuinely eligible payouts to the admin panel.

Admin operations: Beyond payouts, the admin panel handles listing approvals, school management, user accounts, and platform-wide configuration.

Rethread is live and operational across Australia. The 10,000+ school database means any parent, anywhere in the country, can find their school immediately. The dual payout infrastructure — ABA for individual sellers, Stripe Connect for schools — handles both seller types without manual workarounds.

As the builders and operators, we continue developing the platform — expanding school coverage, improving the discovery experience, and growing the seller and buyer base.