One notable thing about the resale industry is, ironically enough, just how new much of it is. It’s especially true with branded resale, as evidenced by brands as prominent as New Balance and Zara launching e-commerce resale sites in 2024, with more certain to do so in the year ahead.
So let us dust off the pre-loved crystal ball and, with the help of two industry leaders, predict what lies ahead for the next trip around the sun.
New legislation will be a tailwind for resale
Right-to-repair laws that require brands to manufacture items in a way that consumers and repair shops can fix them when they break have passed in eight states as of 2024, including in Oregon and Colorado, and legislation was introduced in 30 total states last year, according to the Public Interest Research Group.
Along with diverting electronic devices from landfills, extending their life also avails them to the resale market, which is why an electronics resale marketplace like Back Market champions the laws, and is advocating for more states to pass laws in the upcoming year.
Jake Disraeli, co-founder and CEO of Treet, which has launched resale programs for more than 185 brands, pointed to a recently enacted law in California in September that also is apt to boost resale
The Responsible Textile Recovery Act requires brands to join producer responsibility organizations, which must develop plans to minimize the amount of clothing that goes to landfills (including through resale programs), with slackers facing steep fees as penalties.
To minimize those fees, sustainability executives inside companies “have more ammo in their back pocket to approach their exec teams about why they should be running resale programs,” Disraeli explained.
Resale will lure consumers from the off-price industry
Terry Boyle, CEO of Trove—a branded resale service whose partners include Patagonia and Carhartt—had an 11-year run at Nordstrom Rack that ended in 2019. And Boyle has a message for his old colleagues in the off-price world: We’re coming for you.
“I predict that the resale industry is going to take a chunk of the off-price industry,” Boyle told Retail Brew.
The forces, Boyle said, are in evidence among Trove’s resale brand partners, who find that between 50% and 60% of customers who purchase resale are new to the brand, and that among those first-timers, as many as 30% purchase new items from the brand within the year.
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In retail parlance, those are the kinds of customer acquisition and long-term value (LTV) numbers that make execs weak in the knees. You see where this is going: More value-oriented consumers are getting religion about resale, which in Boyle’s estimation, will divert them from retailers like TJ Maxx.
Plus, as we noted recently, brands increasingly are using their resale channel to sell their overstock and returns, which they’d previously sold for literal bargain-basement wholesale prices to off-price retailers, so that could put the screws to off-price retailers on the supply side, too.
New categories will get their footing
Apparel is a relative no-brainer for resale, at least when it comes to shipping, because no matter how sloppily a reseller stuffs a Lululemon hoodie in a mailer bag, one of the arms is not going to bust off.
The same can’t be said for a set of ceramic mugs, of course, but Treet’s Disraeli predicted that more home goods brands will jump on the resale brandwagon in 2025.
In October, a Treet brand partner, Heath Ceramics, launched its resale program, Pass the Plate, a peer-to-peer resale marketplace, meaning that the brand is confident that seller “Andrea G” will pack her set of two “moonstone and nutmeg” colored pasta bowls carefully when they fetch their $175 asking price.
Disraeli claimed Heath is the first ceramics brand to launch a resale program.
“It’s pretty unheard of,” Disraeli said. “These are very delicate items. Shipping is very expensive.”
But he said Pass the Plate, which even produced a video that shows how to pack ceramics like a pro, had a successful launch, and he said he expects more home goods companies to launch resale programs this year, as well as more electronics, toys, and bedding brands.
“We think there’s a lot of potential in a lot of other categories beyond apparel,” Disraeli said.
Boyle is bullish about other categories making inroads with e-commerce, too.
“In terms of the [resale] categories, luggage, handbags and home are super interesting and starting to come online,” Boyle said.
The potential for branded resale could be as vast as retail itself.
“Our pipeline is more full,” Boyle said. “We’re having more conversations across more industries than we’ve ever had.”