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Marion Hume
A vast and varied commercial landscape, the rocket-fuelled resale market encompasses everything from sophisticated online platforms offering curated collectables to easy ways to sell the unwanted clothes in your closet. The stated shared belief across such diverse offerings is that old clothes are better than new, but the true circularity of the resale model is starting to be called into question.
Visit any fashion resale platform - say, Sellpy, which is 80% owned by H&M - and the claims are compelling. Second-hand equals circularity, and circularity equals lower emissions, mitigating climate change. All by simply making better use of what already exists.
There’s no shortage of old stuff in existence. ThredUp estimates only 5% to 7% of resalable clothing is even reaching the resale market, meaning there’s a motherlode of apparel waiting to be reworn. From a planetary perspective, that’s a plus. As much as 70% of fashion’s negative impact occurs through agriculture, extraction, manufacturing, and processing - in other words, at the beginning. It makes sense to wear what’s there.
Equally, it makes sense to keep clothes in circulation, and therefore out of the earth, for as long as possible. Landfills in the Global South spill over with “trashion” - the fossil fuel fast fashion exported from the Global North - which leaches toxins into soil and sea. Resale keeps clothes out of the dump by extending the average life of a garment, but only by 1.7 times, according to Mckinsey.
Why not longer? Because the second-hand market is bottom-heavy, dominated by “closet clean outs” of poor-quality clothes never designed to last. In some cases, sellers receive discount vouchers in exchange, with which to purchase new fast fashion - a circular system, yes, but not one the planet will thank us for. 43% of consumers who buy fast fashion say they feel guilty for wearing or purchasing it, which points to resale being a handy way of assuaging guilt - then buying more.
ThredUp predicts the resale market will be worth USD 350 billion by 2027. The image this conjures isn't a circle, but the upward arrow of growth. A key reason resale is booming is ongoing investment in the technology that powers its ease of engagement. With the financial market under pressure to fulfil ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) responsibilities, resale trumpets sustainability. Players in this busy sector include US-based The Real Real and Poshmark Inc; the Swedish-funded Lithuanian Vinted; Plum (also known as Hongbulin) in the Chinese market; The Luxury Closet in the United Arab Emirates; GoTrendier in Mexico; and Enjoei in Brazil. Behind these lie investors who look for growth. What do investors call resale? Recommerce.
This new boom market is driven by money when it comes to buyers and sellers on the sites too. Buyers look to save money by trading up to higher-end brands than they could normally afford. For them, sustainability only rates third. Sellers are driven by cash and freeing up closet space, with 32% citing the primary reason for selling is to fund the purchase of first-hand goods. And the richer the seller, the less likely to buy second-hand. Data from Vestiaire Collective, the leader for high-end designer goods, reveals sellers rarely buy on the site. The most sustainable message is to treasure, mend, and continue to wear the clothes you already own. But who can make money out of that?
The younger generation does point to a potentially shifting mindset, however. The younger the respondents, the more likely they are to cite planetary concerns when engaging with resale. Gen Z, the global cohort of 14-28 year olds with a combined global spending power of USD 360 billion, cite motivations for shopping second-hand that include community, reimagining consumption, and self-expression. But let’s not forget they don’t have to get their hands dirty. Technology has made it infinitely easier to dig for treasure.
Resale's recent boom may convince some that the notion of reusing other's discarded garments is novel. But as with many 'sustainable' lifestyle choices, it's merely harking back to a simpler time. Those old enough might specify the inflection point when second-hand ceased to mean second-best as way back in 2001, when Julia Roberts collected her Best Actress Oscar while wearing a Valentino gown dating back a decade earlier. Of course, there was nothing new there either. Samuel Pepys (1633-1703), son of a tailor whose Diary of a Londoner was the zeitgeisty podcast/Substack equivalent of the Enlightenment era, wrote with smug satisfaction about getting old-but-new-to-him apparel restyled to reflect the latest fashions.
Across the Channel, the painter Francois Watteau (1758-1823) celebrated the second-hand chic of his hometown Lille, in a grand canvas called La Braderie which depicts well-dressed citizens perusing offerings of second-hand clothes. The city, which has a history of selling pre-loved one-offs dating all the way back to Medieval times, is today, with a nice circularity, home to the headquarters of upscale second-hand seller Vestiaire Collective. With so much history behind it, the resale landscape would do well to learn from what's come before, rather than attempting to rewrite the entire system.
As with all well-intended but global, consumption-led systems, unintended consequences emerge, and the resale market is no different. The act of washing all these clothes to resell is just one point for discussion. On the leading Gen Z peer-to-peer resale platform Depop, for example, 140,000 items are uploaded daily, all of which have to be cleaned, packaged, and posted to new owners. According to ThredUp, 40% of Gen Z consider future resale value when making a new purchase. Anecdotally, parents of teenagers applaud this - that heap on the bedroom floor has been replaced by a neat pile of freshly-laundered items representing entrepreneurial earnings. But many of the items Gen Z (and other generations) trade in derive from plastic, which sheds some 700,000 tiny toxic plastic microfibres every time it is washed, according to research by the University of Plymouth. These microfibres make their way into our marine environments, our food chain, and eventually our bodies, where ever more startling research points to severe health implications and long-term adverse effects. Few would try to tell teenagers to wash their stuff less - but this does present a conundrum.
Upscale resale platforms don't fair much better, actively promoting goods be shipped dry cleaned, a process with its own unwanted impact. All of which brings us back to the metric that matters most - impact is reduced with every wear. 'Choose well, clean less' is the real action needed, but the resale market is convincing consumers this isn't a necessary behavioural change.
For all its nuances and potential pitfalls, new resale models are emerging that push the needle back towards 'one-of-a-kind' investment pieces vs fast-fashion hauls at a fraction of an already low cost. Known Source, for example, stakes its own reputation with every sale, offering a platform in which the 'dealers' themselves - not just the goods they sell - are curated. Only those who are obsessed with the authenticity of the labels in which they trade are invited to join. Known Source also offers its own in-house circularity. It has such faith in everything it sells that once any purchaser has grown tired of an item, it will buy it back at market rate - which at this rarified level is more likely to go up than down. “What sets us apart is a circular ecosystem of specialist dealers. Every product is made to last. We’ve vetted the dealers. We’ve vetted the supply. We’re happy to buy it back and re-list it,” says Theo El-Kattan, Known Source co-founder. “Yes, profit is important. We aim to support our dealers. But the ambition is to create a business with a positive impact.”
Elsewhere, brands themselves, rather than third party platforms, are offering ways in which genuinely pre-loved pieces can find new homes - not just the stuff bought for one night out then moved on to make way for the next. Mother of Pearl and Toast support circular models by which clients can resell items that are well cared for, thereby following in the laudably light footsteps of Eileen Fisher, who has offered this for over a decade, saving 1.9 million pieces from landfill since 2009 as a result. Fisher encourages customers to use the system through Renew Reward incentives worth USD 5, 'money' that can only be used to buy other 'second-hand' items. And these brands don't just stop at resale either. Toast’s Renewed range combines the concept of resale with repair, with a newly formed team of in-house repair artists transforming returned or damaged goods into one-of-a-kind pieces for resale.
On balance, resale skews strongly planet positive. The ease of online platforms opens up a vast market to global buyers and sellers, allowing every preloved or unloved item a new chance to shine.
Rather than 'designing for resale', create clothes so desirable we won’t want to part with them for a very long time, clothes that can be mended and treasured until at last they find another home. Offer alterations at point of purchase to facilitate long-term use - a key reason clients fall out of love with their choices is they don’t fit in the first place.
If and when clothes enter the resale sector, “curate and rotate” to extend their life cycle, offering consumers seemingly newly added items thanks to the lens through which they're discovered. At the same time, create a resale model that prides itself on hand-selected pieces, demonstrating the value in design, craft, and ownership to encourage a keepsake mentality.
The more platforms there are, the more counterfeiters try to infiltrate with new fake goods. The cost of extra vigilance means a price hike for goods, paradoxically eroding resale’s primary appeal - price.