Creating secondhand streams for fashion merchandise is one major lever toward lowering the industry’s impact. Increasingly, brands are playing an active role in resale, eyeing both the environmental and economic opportunities of giving their garments a second life.
Brand-owned resale has ballooned in the last four years from a few early adopters to hundreds of companies today as brands seek to control their secondhand sales and gain a piece of this growing retail category. Aiding this accelerating adoption rate are solutions that power resale for brands, such as Treet, which counts roughly 200 brand partners. More than just a circularity strategy, the financial and business case for branded resale is strong, explained executives from Treet and Dôen during a panel at Sourcing Journal x Rivet Sustainability L.A. moderated by Sourcing Journal’s sourcing and labor editor Jasmin Malik Chua. Treet even goes so far as to promise profitability for its users.
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“Resale is no longer this footnote that needs to cost a lot of money,” said Jake Disraeli. “It’s actually going to guarantee that you will make more money than you’re putting into it.”
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As California-based label Dôen entered the recommerce space, it tapped Nellie Cohen, who launched Patagonia’s Worn Wear resale program, to help it build its own secondhand marketplace. “We create goods with longevity in mind, not just from a product durability and quality standpoint, but also in terms of the design aesthetic, creating classic, timeless silhouettes that really don’t go out of style,” said Kristine Kim, senior director, impact and responsible sourcing at Dôen. “We really wanted to stand behind that circularity principle and create a community where our Dôen customer could put back a pre-loved item into the marketplace.”
Together with Treet, Dôen built out a custom secondhand platform — dubbed Hand Me Dôen —that was “brand authentic.” This includes the look and feel of the site as well as how drops are merchandized. Owning this secondhand offshoot also allows Dôen to authenticate, repair and clean merchandise to its standards. “We put a lot of love and care into how we curate the shopping experience for our Hand Me Dôen customer,” said Kim.
Rather than a consignment model, the brand buys its secondhand inventory from consumers upfront. To date, the brand has bought back 11,000 items, diverting 17,000 pounds of clothing from landfills. A case study showed that Hand Me Dôen’s carbon footprint is 92 percent smaller than the footprint for new Dôen items, and 37 percent of Dôen’s secondhand sales actually replace the purchase of a new good.
One brand-side concern that often crops up around resale is cannibalization of main store sales. However, 37 percent of Hand Me Dôen customers said in a survey that they turned to secondhand to find items they missed out on when they initially launched at retail. Additionally, many shoppers that originate as resale customers go on to shop Dôen.
Disraeli noted that although trade-in models like Dôen’s are now live with around 10 percent of Treet’s partner brands, peer-to-peer resale is more widely adopted as the starting point for retailers to “[dip] their toe in the water.” While trade-in offers sellers more ease, peer-to-peer attracts the “value seekers” that want to get the highest payout for their items.
In addition to consumers selling goods, some of Treet’s partners use resale as a channel for returned merchandise that is deemed second quality.
One logistical consideration as resale takes off is the manual labor required for receiving and assessing goods and fulfilling orders. Disraeli noted the insufficient number of warehouses that are equipped to manage merchandise on a single stock keeping unit level but added that Treet’s third-party logistics partners are hiring up to manage this.
For Dôen, the challenge largely revolves around keeping up with “tremendous” demand, and ensuring that it has enough product coming in from consumers to supply Hand Me Dôen.
Disraeli noted that there is still room for growth, as recent data showed only a small portion of resalable goods end up resold. “Brands are in the best position to accelerate the secondhand movement,” said Disraeli. “They have the most data on who has their items, especially DTC-specific brands, and so they have the privilege and responsibility to make sure that those items avoid landfill.”