While retail brands are opening resale stores at a steady clip, they earn the highest margin from selling new items. That’s why their online stores don’t make a habit of shooing away customers looking to buy new products and urging them to buy used products instead.
But that’s exactly what Peak Design, which makes bags and gear for cameras and everyday use, did recently. Most days, the online store for Peak Design is typical: photographs of products against a white background. But online shoppers who visited it on Earth Day this past Saturday were greeted by no photos, just a black screen with a logo and a short message.
“Buy used,” it read. “Great gear gets better with age. Try shopping used before you shop new.” Then there was a prominent link to the brand’s resale site, PD Marketplace, which it launched with resale platform partner Recurate in 2021.
Finally, there was a link to the main website, but it was decidedly secondary to wishing people a happy Earth Day and directing them to the resale site.
Peter Dering, founder and CEO of Peak Design, said that promoting resale highlights that the brand’s products retain value.
“What we want to do with our products is make them project the notion that they are assets, not expenses,” Dering told Retail Brew. “If you buy a $50 phone case from us and you resell it again for $30 after two years of use—well, then it costs you $20.”
As you’d expect, the Earth Day promotion increased sales on the resale site:
- PD Marketplace revenue on Earth Day totaled $20,500, more than five times the daily average of $4,000 through March 22, according to the brand
But what may be less expected is that sales on the main site with new products, which had been blacked out to send consumers to the resale site, also increased.
- Peak Design sold a total of $73,600 in new products on Earth Day, compared to a daily average of $66,400 YTD, a 10.8% increase.
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Dering wasn’t sure why, despite the urging to go to the resale site, many visitors still clicked through to the new site, but said he suspected that emails and other marketing efforts around the Earth Day promotion boosted traffic to the site overall.
Dering hopes other brands will duplicate his effort to highlight not just the environmental benefits of resale, but the resale value of their products.
“That’s the end-state scenario that we’re really hoping to carry through with our customers, and that other brands might see this as well,” Dering said. “It’s better for the world but it also…encourages people to shop for something with a brand name because it will carry value when you’re done using it.”