Chapter 1 — full chapter
1.3.2.1. Resale and Recommerce
This is the largest and fastest-growing avenue. The global second-hand apparel market was worth roughly 230 billion US dollars in 2024 and is expanding several times faster than the clothing market overall. Brands that run their own resale keep the customer relationship instead of handing it to a third-party marketplace.
For example Patagonia’s Worn Wear programme takes back used gear for store credit (typically in the range of 10 to 100 US dollars), curates it, and resells it at a margin on its own platform. In its first year it reportedly moved more Patagonia products than the brand’s items sold on eBay. Eileen Fisher has reclaimed over a million garments through its take-back scheme, and Madewell collected around 180,000 pairs of jeans within six months of launching its resale programme.
Smaller labels need not build this alone: resale-as-a-service platforms such as Trove and Recurate operate in-house resale for dozens of brands. A passport strengthens resale in two ways — it lets a customer list an item almost automatically instead of photographing and describing it by hand, and it can support dynamic resale pricing based on the item’s documented history.