CULVER CITY, Calif. — More people in China are tuning into NBA games than there are people living in the U.S. and Goat chief executive officer Eddy Lu likes the sound of that statistic.
That’s because Lu oversees the sneaker reselling platform Goat, which merged with Flight Club in February. The deal merged digital and brick-and-mortar businesses, now giving the combined entity the muscle to use its size to test new endeavors such as augmented reality, women’s, brick-and-mortar and international expansion.
The business, backed by $97.6 million raised to date, started in 2015 by Lu and Daishin Sugano and was born out of the founders’ own frustration as sneaker buyers who had encountered their fair share of challenges in buying authenticated product. Goat has aimed to change that process. The company authenticates shoes coming in for resale and then ships them out in Goat-branded packaging. Flight Club added a long-standing name in the industry and the additional expertise in physical retail and a concession business model.
The merged entity has gone from 100 to 500 employees over the past year and now counts more than 10 million registered users on Goat. That compares with 2 million users around the same time last year,
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