By Will Novosedlik
The fact that luxury items stand the test of time may be their greatest selling point. Think of the long-running tagline “You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation.” But even if you’re wealthy enough to buy an Oscar de la Renta gown and only wear it once or twice, it seems a crime to leave it in the closet, never to be worn again.
That’s the mindset that has informed the massively successful luxury resale market. What started as a handful of online consignment sites like Vestiaire Collective, The RealReal and The Luxury Closet, has now become about how individual luxury banners like Gucci, Alexander McQueen, Chloé and Balenciaga have all hopped on board to build their own recommerce sites.
The business case is difficult to ignore. The market for previously owned high-end goods was at $30.5 billion in 2021 and growing four times faster than the primary luxury market at 12% per year versus 3%, according to Statista. The resale market is now growing at a rate five times faster than traditional retail and should be worth $84 billion by 2025, compared to fast fashion’s predicted worth of $50 billion. By 2027 it’s expected to climb to a whopping $250 billion.
One of the latest brands to jump in is Canada Goose with its Generations platform, which launched in Canada just a month ago. “With the growth of resale and recommerce platforms, we knew consumer demand in pre-loved Canada Goose products was robust and growing,” Canada Goose president Carrie Baker shares. “Our research showed that online searches for ‘secondhand Canada Goose’ had grown substantially year over year. At the same time, one of the challenges we saw in luxury recommerce was consumer concern over authenticity.”
That concern partly explains why individual luxury brands have gotten into the direct resale market. They hold the documents that allow them to easily authenticate vintage pieces, giving them an advantage over multi-brand platforms. Oscar de la Renta, for example, saw a number of problems with how its brand was presented by third parties. Some items were wrongly identified. Others were difficult to authenticate. It just didn’t measure up to the Oscar de la Renta brick-and-mortar shopping experience. So, it built its own resale site.
And what is behind this rapidly growing phenomenon, which is projected to represent as much as 23% of all commerce by 2030?
Nicki Gondell, principle and research lead at NYC-based Trend House, a trend forecasting consultancy firm, says, “I see three reasons for this: value, sustainability and individuality. It’s like buying an expensive car and asking yourself what the resale value will be. Value is an important factor in the purchase decision. Fashion has also historically been a very wasteful industry – especially fast fashion. And with regards to sustainability, people are becoming more concerned about keeping pre-loved apparel out of landfill. They want to be part of the circular economy and luxury resale fits right into that mindset.”
Canada Goose, however, is no stranger to the circular economy as Baker notes. “We have been a pioneer in ‘slow fashion’ before the term was even coined, keeping sustainability at the forefront for the past six decades.” How, then, has Generations performed since it launched seven months ago in the U.S.? According to Baker, they are seeing strong results.
“Generations gift card redemption has driven incremental revenue on CanadaGoose.com in the U.S. Parkas are the most traded-in item, accounting for about 60% of trade in inventory. More than half of gift card redemption is happening on CanadaGoose.com,” she says. “Our commercial channels are complementary, so Generations benefits the entire ecosystem, extending the consumer journey and providing more ways to fall in love with our product.”
The third reason for the rise of luxury resale, according to Gondell, is individuality. “I think it allows people to put together unique looks. If you shop vintage and you shop luxury, and you’re buying things that are two years old or five years old, or even Yohji Yamamoto pieces from the 80s, you can just pull all of these things together and create your own individual look. Instead of buying something that everybody has, you buy one or two awesome pieces, and then you can style them up the way you want to.”
There’s a generational aspect to all of this as well. In a 2021 article in fashion trade magazine TheIndustry.fashion, trend forecaster Petah Marian reminds us that the future of luxury will be determined by the next generation of shoppers. “Younger generations increasingly see luxury purchases as assets that they will get some kind of return on once they are done with them. Similarly, we are looking at younger generations having less purchasing power overall, which means that resale and rental provides a more aspirational consumer access to a brand.”
Rental? Yes, you heard that right. Rent the Runway offers subscription-based access to a “rotating closet” of designer garments, which members can rent for specific occasions. The plan gives you access to 10 garments-a-month, curated from a stable of 750 designers. The monthly plan includes two free shipments of dry-cleaned, pressed and ready-to-wear garments.
And if you can’t afford that, there’s always GoodwillFinds, where you can find pre-loved items from Nike, Lululemon, Kate Spade, Gucci, Prada and Ralph Lauren. The long-established thrift store is also pitching its new resale platform with a focus on sustainability. Its social messaging reminds us that the textile industry uses 98 million tons of non-renewable resources each year, and that every year GoodwillFinds diverts more than three billion pounds of used goods from landfills. It seems that, whether you find it at GoodwillFinds or buy it from Gucci, luxury fashion can live on forever.
