The Problem They Chose
Fashion overproduces structurally; industry estimates put the unsold share at 10–30% of production each season. Yet in 2022, the mechanism for clearing that surplus across Europe was barely a mechanism at all: phone-call liquidators recovering cents on the euro, informal traders, and brands so worried about discount visibility that many preferred warehousing stock to selling it.
Ciprian Dudulea (CEO), Horia Stupu, and Șerban Buliga founded Unfrosen on a reading of that market that proved exactly right: the surplus trade was not undersupplied or underdemanded — it was under-trusted. Brands would clear if clearing were invisible; buyers would buy if authenticity were guaranteed. Both were infrastructure problems, and infrastructure can be built.
What They Built
The platform that resulted is private by design. Buyers — independent boutiques, multi-brand stores, resellers — pass business verification before seeing a single listing. Suppliers document the provenance of their stock before listing it. Between the two sides sits an architecture of controlled visibility: geo-blocking by country, buyer-type filtering, anonymous listings under generic product codes, upfront payment to suppliers with zero commission on the sell side.
The numbers trace the thesis working. The network has grown to more than 5,000 verified retail buyers across upwards of ten European countries, sourcing from a catalog of 150+ premium and sportswear brands — Nike, Adidas, Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, Lacoste, Diesel, Guess, and Michael Kors among them — at discounts of up to 85% off retail. In 2025 the company added over 50 new suppliers, its largest single-year expansion, and closed the year at €6.5 million in GMV. The 2026 target is past €10 million, with expansion planned into Spain, Portugal, Germany, and the Netherlands.
“European retail is going through one of its most difficult periods of the past decade,” Stupu has said of the timing. “Sales are slowing, inventories are piling up, and pressure on cash flow has become critical. This context created a structural opportunity for specialized B2B platforms which can move inventory internationally in a controlled, fast, and confidential manner.”
The Bucharest Angle
That this infrastructure emerged from Romania is less surprising than it first reads. Bucharest sits at the geographic and commercial hinge of the European fashion trade’s two halves — the Western markets that generate premium surplus and the Central-Eastern retail landscape, fragmented across thousands of independents, that hungrily absorbs it. The founders built where the two sides of their marketplace naturally meet, with the cost base to iterate patiently on a trust product that could not be rushed.
“Selling overstock doesn’t mean losing control,” Dudulea has said — as close as the company comes to a thesis statement. It reads simply, but it inverts decades of industry fatalism, in which clearing surplus and protecting a brand were assumed to be opposites.
The broader lesson for European founders is the one this story shares with the best of its genre: the fashionable problems are crowded, and the unfashionable ones — the decades-old inefficiencies everyone complains about and nobody engineers — are where infrastructure companies get built. Three founders in Bucharest picked fashion’s least glamorous corner. It is returning the favour.
Unfrosen (unfrosen.com) is a private B2B wholesale fashion platform founded in 2022 in Bucharest, Romania, by Ciprian Dudulea, Horia Stupu, and Șerban Buliga — serving 5,000+ verified retailers across 10+ European countries with authenticated branded surplus from 150+ premium and sportswear brands. unfrosen.com.
