Depop began as a shopping page for a magazine.
Simon Beckerman, born in Milan, had spent years publishing PIG, a quarterly about emerging people in fashion, music and design. Readers kept asking where they could buy the clothes in its pages. His first idea, as he later described it, was a shop that would sell everything the magazine featured.
He saw that eBay, Etsy and Gumtree served everyday utility, not the underground communities he knew.
Beckerman was no stranger to starting things. In 2006 he and his brother launched a glasses brand. Before that he had immersed himself in industrial design and the arts. None of it made him rich, but each project taught him a skill he would later need.
Publishing, he told an interviewer in 2019, taught him how to tell stories, talk to an audience and use influencers.
In 2011 the idea took shape at H-Farm, an Italian incubator near Venice. He saw that eBay, Etsy and Gumtree served everyday utility, not the underground communities he knew. He wanted a place for like-minded people, and described Depop as a rebellious little kid always looking for what is exciting.
Money came in small pieces, and none of it arrived all at once. A seed from Paolo Barberis and Nana Bianca in 2012, then EUR 1M in 2013 from Red Circle, which came with a new chief executive, Runar Reistrup. In 2015 Balderton and HV put in $8M. Maria Raga, who had joined as operations chief in 2014, took over as CEO in 2016.
Growth hit its stride in 2019, when General Atlantic led a $62M Series C and a Depop store opened inside Selfridges in London. By 2020, gross sales more than doubled to $650M and revenue to $70M.
The same year brought ugly problems. Scammers pushed buyers to pay by direct bank transfer, outside the platform's protection, and some buyers were tricked in October 2020 and had their details sold on the dark web. Depop promised mandatory password updates and multi-factor authentication.
Etsy bought Depop in 2021 for $1.6bn. In February 2026 Etsy agreed to sell it to eBay for $1.2bn, and the deal closed in July 2026.
Depop sits today inside a larger marketplace group, but it still keeps its own name and identity, which says something about how strongly its community felt about it. Beckerman's lesson is that a side project to serve readers can become a business. He just had to notice what his audience kept asking for.