How Poshmark’s Clickwrap Champ Leveraged Ironclad to Cut Contract Turnaround Time Down by 96%

Poshmark, a leading fashion resale marketplace, faced a unique challenge. Individual sellers, wholesalers, and enterprise sellers are all vital to the brand’s success. Poshmark holds in-person events for them, hosts user feedback sessions both in-person and virtually, and, of course, manages its massive online community. Every relationship needs a legal agreement, whether for an hour-long interview or a multi-figure sales deal.

Live events — a key part of Poshmark’s strategy for building community — require participants to complete a photo release for photo usage, traditionally done with wet signatures from hundreds of attendees. Enrolling wholesale and enterprise sellers demands its own painstaking legal process, and Poshmark had been doing this work manually, sending out hundreds of packets to be signed by sellers before seller onboarding. This process needed a revamp.

Rip and Replace, Just in the Nick of Time

Enter Lindsey Nelson, Director, Legal – Commercial at Poshmark, a self-described Ironclad superfan. “When I started (her previous role) at Gusto in January of 2019, they had already implemented ironclad,” Lindsey said. Coming from the non-tech world, as she called it, contract lifecycle management (CLM) was not the norm. Lindsey took a shine to it, fast.

Lindsey found herself joining Poshmark amidst the implementation of another contracting solution. During her first week on the job, the third-party implementation team walked her through the workflows they had designed. Lindsey saw an opportunity for a better solution. “We need ironclad for sure. This will not work for us as the business evolves and scales.”

There were two key challenges with the workflows, as Lindsey saw it. First, the overall user experience wasn’t good. “Just not user friendly,” Lindsey said. “Clunky. Too many clicks to get anything done.” The second was that the workflow system wasn’t designed to be flexible. Once a workflow was created, any tweak required hiring a professional services consultant or engaging the solution vendor. From her time at Gusto, Lindsey knew Ironclad Workflow Designer was both user friendly and endlessly flexible, and also built to scale with a growing business like Poshmark. The team agreed, and they ended development to replace the planned solution with Ironclad. Out with the new, half-installed system, and in with Ironclad. It’s been a raging success ever since.

Lindsey is responsible for all of Poshmark’s commercial agreements, NDAs, terms of service, sweepstakes compliance, and corporate patents and trademark portfolio, meaning her work touches all parts of the company, from marketing and events to procurement and sales.

A Workflow for Every Situation

With influencers in the US, Canada, and Australia, each with their own distinct agreements governed by different laws and clauses, Poshmark was in need of an adaptable contracting solution. In-person events have even more special requirements for things like photo usage and COVID waivers, again differing by country. That’s a lot of paper to wrangle. Especially for a team of one.

Ironclad’s Workflow Designer came to the rescue, offering Lindsey a flexible, easy way to create and manage all of Poshmark’s agreements.

High Volume Agreements are a Snap with Clickwrap

Less than a year after adopting Ironclad CLM, Ironclad Clickwrap became another essential tool in Poshmark’s arsenal. “When I started at Poshmark, I had talked about Clickwrap a little bit, but it just wasn’t something we wanted to do right away,” she said. But as she dug into company processes around logging acceptance of the terms of service with the engineering team, the upside grew more clear. “Yes,” Lindsey remembered thinking, “We definitely need Clickwrap.”

Clickwrap, Ironclad’s click-to-accept solution simplified the management of non-negotiable, high volume agreements. Instead of manually sending packets, Poshmark now sends a link to the contract, to be agreed upon with a single click. In short order, Clickwrap completely transformed the way Poshmark handled their legal documents.

The real-world impact on Poshmark’s business was immediate. In-person events were no longer marred by long lines for check-in to obtain wet signatures on photo releases. Instead, attendees clicked-to-sign in advance, helping make registration at events a breeze. Clickwrap also helped streamline their onboarding process for enterprise sellers by cutting their contract turnaround times down by 96%, driving revenue gains as new businesses got up and running on Poshmark faster.

Adoption is the Best Kind of Customer Review

Poshmark implemented Ironclad in November 2021 with roughly 40 users. Eighteen months later, they’ve scaled up to over a hundred users. “I consistently get great feedback. Everyone who uses the system for the first time says, Oh my gosh, I love ironclad,” Lindsey said. That’s the kind of customer review we’ll take every time.