Quince, the direct-to-consumer luxury-for-less brand that started in fashion but has since expanded into home, jewelry, beauty and more, just received $500 million in funding that pushed its valuation to $10.1 billion. 

The Series E funding round, led by Iconiq, will be used to propel continued growth and international expansion as Quince further disrupts the luxury market with its manufacturer-to-consumer retail business model that delivers luxury quality goods at mass-market prices.

“Quince has built hyperefficient infrastructure that enables it to deliver unmatched value to consumers at scale and, in turn, has built a brand people love,” said Yoonkee Sull, general partner at Iconiq in a statement. 

“By redesigning how premium products are manufactured and delivered, compressing traditional retail cycle times and reducing waste, and building a deep understanding of what customers want in real-time, the company is correcting structural inefficiencies that have long defined retail economics,” he added. 

Not Price But Process

The San Francisco-based Quince was founded in 2018 by Sid Gupta, now CEO, alongside Sourabh Mahajan, chief technology officer, and Zunu Mittal, company president. 

Prior to Quince, Gupta worked in private equity for nearly five years, then started the Lolli and Pops candy company, which grew to over 90 stores before his exit. 

From candy to fashion might seem like a leap, but Gupta and his team’s primary focus is on the process, not the product.

The founders identified innumerable inefficiencies in the high-end fashion ecosystem and set out to eliminate them, all the while reducing prices for the end consumer. 

Quince’s distinctive manufacturing-to-consumer business model restructured the traditional retail supply chain and reduced excess production and inventory by using AI-demand models to forecast production volumes.  

“For decades, consumers have been conditioned to equate higher prices with higher quality,” Matt Lippert, Quince’s chief commercial officer, said in a statement. “We play in categories where quality is tangible and measurable to disprove that assumption. The model is simple: design a different system that eliminates the waste consumers have traditionally paid for in retail.”

Quince launched with a curated assortment of luxury fashion essentials to test the streamlined business model. It opened with a Mongolian cashmere sweater for $50—still available—and washable silk dresses for $60. The model worked like a charm and Quince has gone on to reach over $1 billion in top-line revenue last year. 

Prices Beyond Compare

Quince prices are unmatched for luxury fabrications, like Mongolian cashmere, Italian leather, organic cotton, washable silk and European linen. It clearly makes the point on every product page where the price and features of Quince’s offering are compared with comparable products from other brands. 

For example, a Quince cashmere sweater costs $39 to produce and deliver to the consumer for $50. Competitors pay comparable production costs, but sell their products at greatly elevated retail prices, such as a comparable cashmere sweater for $148 at J. Crew, $178 at Everlane, and $295 from Naked Cashmere.

It goes without saying that these stark comparisons on every product page have gotten under the skin of the higher-priced brands. Quince has been sued by Coach and Ugg for trade dress infringement and, most recently, by Williams Sonoma for false advertising, deceptive marketing, and inflated competitor pricing. These suits are still ongoing, but one trade dress suit by Yeti over tumbler design was settled in 2023. 

In the realm of fashion, trade dress cases are notoriously difficult to win. Quince also specializes in classic basics, which may provide some cover, though Coach’s and Ugg’s suits claim it copied distinctive brand-identifying style elements.

Luxury Loses, Quince Wins

Beyond offering luxury-quality materials and timeless classic designs, Quince also borrows from the luxury playbook in how it releases products. The brand relies on exclusive availability and limited drops, producing items in small batches that sell out quickly. That scarcity creates urgency. For Gen Z, who live on their phones and shop in real time, FOMO is a powerful motivator.

Zoomers also take pride in being savvy shoppers who know how to get the best value for their money. Luxury brands have largely dropped the ball in that regard since the pandemic. Bernstein estimated that luxury brand prices rose 36% between 2020 and 2023 with little discernable improvement in quality and prices have continued to climb since then. 

A case in point: the price of the Chanel Classic Flap bag nearly doubled from 2019 to 2025, up from about $6,000 to more than $11,000 today. In Bain’s latest luxury goods report, it noted that the traditional luxury price-to-value equation has broken down as brands pushed through similar same-item price increases, creating a consumer-trust gap. 

While luxury prices have gone through the roof since the pandemic, Bain reported that the total addressable market for luxury shrank from 380 million consumers in 2019 to between 335 million and 345 million in 2025, with the share of active buyers within the TAM dropping from ~60% to ~40%-45%.   

The decline isn’t a coincidence: when luxury brands stop delivering value, consumers stop paying their prices.

Where Have 40 Million Luxury Consumers Gone? 

Since 2019, Baby Boomers have largely aged out of the core personal luxury market, dropping from 23% share to just 10% of the $415 billion global market in 2025. So far, Millennials and Gen Z have largely picked up the slack. Millennials’ share climbed from 36% in 2019 to 47% in 2025, while Gen Z grew from 8% to 19%. Meanwhile, Gen X’s share slipped from 30% to 25%. 

With Boomers exiting and Gen X contracting, luxury brands are looking to Gen Z as the next engine of growth. By 2030, Zoomers are expected to account for between 25% to 30% of the market. But they aren’t engaging with luxury brands at the same pace as Millennials did at the same age. 

Bain reported that aspirational luxury—the traditional entry point for new luxury customers—softened in 2025 as so-called “aspirational consumers” traded down to more accessible, less premium brands—Quince being an example of such an accessible brand.

Great Quality For An Affordable Price Never Goes Out Of Style 

Numerous surveys have shown that Gen Z consumers are increasingly price- and value-conscious. For example, a survey conducted by PwC last fall among 4,000 consumers, including 1,000 Gen Z adults, found that Gen Z expected to reduce holiday spending at a significantly higher rate that other generational cohorts. 

However, PwC drew an important conclusion about Gen Z’s planned cut back: 

“While Gen Z’s pullback may look like a simple case of belt-tightening at first glance, it actually reveals something more complex. It’s a generational shift in how value is defined and where money feels worth spending. Gen Z isn’t just price-conscious. They’re value-conscious, with an emphasis on emotional and social value, not just discounts.”

That value shift is precisely what Quince was engineered for—and why it has earned its current $10.1 billion valuation. Quince isn’t just a cheap dupe brand. It’s a structurally different retailer built for a generation that demands transparency, quality and fairness in the price/value equation.

The opportunity is enormous. Gen Z will represent some $12 trillion in spending power by 2030, according to NielsenIQ and GfK in collaboration with World Data Lab (WDL). Quince’s manufacturer-to-consumer model that cuts out intermediaries and delivers consumers premium quality at radically lower prices aligns perfectly with what this generation values most.

But Quince’s appeal goes far beyond Gen Z. It resonates with a much broader segment of consumers who are increasingly unwilling to pay inflated legacy luxury markups. And everybody wants the highest quality products at the best price. 

As Quince expands into new categories and international markets using the same disciplined M2C model, it’s got a long runway for growth.