The Future of Resale

Summary

Summary of "The Future of Resale" – The Business of Fashion Podcast

Release Date: December 3, 2024

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Introduction

In the December 3, 2024 episode of The Business of Fashion Podcast, host Brian Baskin and senior correspondent Sheena Butler Young delve into the evolving landscape of the resale market within the fashion industry. Titled “The Future of Resale,” the episode explores the substantial growth of secondhand clothing, the shifting consumer perceptions, the rise of multiple resale platforms, and the implications for sustainability and brand strategies.

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The Growth and Mainstreaming of Resale

The podcast begins by highlighting the transformation of resale from a niche hobby to a robust $50 billion industry in the United States alone. Brian Baskin notes a significant shift where consumers no longer differentiate between new and used clothing, transitioning resale from a mere marketing tool to a legitimate business avenue for brands and independent platforms alike.

Notable Quote:

"We're a long way from the days when resale meant hunting through thrift shops. Today, secondhand clothing... is a $50 billion business in the US alone."
— Brian Baskin [00:21]

Kat Chen, the retail editor, shares her personal journey with secondhand shopping, emphasizing its transition to mainstream acceptance. Sheena Butler Young echoes this sentiment with her own experience from over a decade ago, illustrating how societal attitudes toward secondhand items have drastically improved.

Notable Quote:

"Nowadays, secondhand fashion is no longer just a niche interest. It's become totally mainstream."
— Kat Chen [01:31]

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Key Players and Competitive Landscape

The discussion shifts to the proliferation of resale platforms. Brian Baskin observes that despite its maturity, the resale market lacks a dominant leader, with numerous platforms like The RealReal, Poshmark, Depop, Vestiaire Collective, and emerging players like Vinted constantly vying for market share.

Kat Chen elaborates on the competitive dynamics, explaining how platforms are undercutting each other through aggressive commission fee structures to attract both buyers and sellers. An example cited is Poshmark’s recent attempt to transfer part of the seller fees to buyers, which was swiftly reversed due to negative impacts on sales.

Notable Quote:

"There's very little consumer loyalty in this space. When I consider selling something, I consider every single one of these platforms."
— Kat Chen [11:16]

Brian Baskin highlights Vinted’s rapid growth in Europe, underscoring the challenges established platforms face in maintaining their market position amidst continuous new entrants.

Notable Quote:

"Vinted... they're challenging Vestiaire Collective, which is the established resale player there."
— Brian Baskin [10:32]

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Sustainability and Consumer Behavior

Sheena Butler Young introduces the topic of sustainability, discussing whether resale truly contributes to environmental benefits. Kat Chen acknowledges the narrative but points out the lack of concrete evidence showing a significant reduction in fashion's carbon footprint due to resale. Instead, she suggests that resale may inadvertently encourage more consumption, as consumers feel more confident purchasing new items knowing they can resell them later.

Notable Quote:

"Whether resale is actually sustainable, whether it has had an effect on fashion's overall carbon footprint, that has not been proven."
— Kat Chen [05:35]

Sheena adds a personal anecdote about purchasing secondhand shoes not necessarily being an eco-friendly act, prompting a brief humorous exchange about the broader impact of individual choices.

Notable Quote:

"I don't think I saved the planet with my Manolo Blahnik purchase."
— Sheena Butler Young [05:49]

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Innovations in Handling Returns: Reselling the Unsellable

The episode introduces a secondary focus on managing unsellable inventory through innovative platforms like Bazaar and Revive. E-commerce correspondent Malik Morris explains the complexities brands face with online returns, where returned items often cannot be resold as new due to minor defects or wear.

Bazaar and Revive offer solutions by creating marketplaces specifically for these “unsellable” items, allowing brands to monetize returns that would otherwise result in significant losses. Malik highlights Bazaar’s unique approach of listing items “as is,” similar to established resale platforms, thereby expanding the potential for brands to recoup losses and reach new customers.

Notable Quote:

"Bazaar is bringing it out in the open and trying to remove some of the stigma around buying something that was returned."
— Malik Morris [22:50]

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Challenges and Ethical Considerations

Kat Chen raises concerns about market practices, such as resellers inflating prices or misrepresenting fast fashion items as vintage, which could undermine the integrity of the resale ecosystem. She anticipates the introduction of stricter guardrails to combat these issues, ensuring the resale market remains trustworthy and sustainable.

Notable Quote:

"We're seeing these hiccups in resale where this ecosystem is being exploited a little bit."
— Kat Chen [28:12]

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Future Outlook and Predictions

In the concluding segment, Brian Baskin predicts that the resale market will continue to fragment without a single dominant player, leading platforms to differentiate through branding and unique value propositions. He envisions the emergence of product search tools that aggregate listings across multiple platforms, reducing brand loyalty and emphasizing product desirability regardless of the resale source.

Sheena Butler Young anticipates a growing emphasis on integrating resale into brand strategies, with roles like "CEO of Resale" emerging to manage these initiatives. This integration could foster cross-functional expertise and bolster customer acquisition through affordable and sustainable purchasing options.

Kat Chen adds that backlash against unethical reselling practices will prompt resale platforms and brands to implement more robust oversight, ensuring authenticity and fair pricing.

Notable Quotes:

"Resale is going to flatten out. There's not going to be some resale giant that emerges."
— Brian Baskin [26:52]

"The opportunity to have talent touch resale and learn cross-functional skills... can actually be interesting."
— Sheena Butler Young [27:28]

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Conclusion

The episode wraps up with host Brian Baskin emphasizing the multifaceted opportunities and challenges within the resale market. The panelists agree that while resale has achieved significant mainstream acceptance, its future will depend on how platforms and brands navigate competition, sustainability claims, and ethical practices. As the resale ecosystem continues to evolve, its integration into broader business strategies will likely play a pivotal role in shaping the fashion industry's trajectory.

Notable Quote:

"Resale can prove that it is an avenue for them to achieve... it can further validate and expand the resale economy."
— Malik Morris [29:01]

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This comprehensive discussion in The Business of Fashion Podcast underscores the dynamic and rapidly changing nature of the resale market, highlighting its potential to reshape consumer behavior, brand strategies, and sustainability efforts within the fashion industry.

Transcript

[Sheena Butler Young]

Foreign.

[Brian Baskin]

Hello, and welcome to the debrief from the Business of Fashion, where each week we delve into Our most popular BoF professional stories with the correspondents who created them. I'm executive editor Brian Baskin.

[Sheena Butler Young]

And I'm senior correspondent Sheena Butler Young.

[Brian Baskin]

And today, we are talking all things resale. We are a long way from the days when resale meant hunting through thrift shops. Today, secondhand clothing is, depending on how you Measure It, a $50 billion business in the US alone. But it feels like sometime in the last year or two, we crossed a threshold where a critical mass of consumers no longer distinguish between new and used. It's gone from being a marketing gimmick to a real business for many brands and independent platforms. I even had someone who works with a lot of luxury brands tell me recently that one reason they've been so confident about raising prices is they know a lot of their customers are thinking about selling that $5,000 handbag even. Even as they're buying it. We're going to talk to retail editor Kat Chen about how we got here and just how big resale can get.

[Sheena Butler Young]

And later, we'll talk to E Commerce correspondent Malik Morris about a different kind of resale that is changing how retailers handle your returns.

[Brian Baskin]

First off, thank you for joining us, Kat.

[Kat Chen]

Thanks for having me, guys. Excited to be here again.

[Brian Baskin]

So we're going to get into all the big players in this category and what's going on. But first, I wanted to ask you, what is your personal relationship with resale? Do you shop secondhand?

[Kat Chen]

Yeah, absolutely. I would consider myself a pretty big secondhand shopper. I've been shopping secondhand for the past 15 years. When I was in high school, you know, my friends and I were shopping at the Salvation army, and this was that hipster Tumblr era when old stuff was cool and ironic. But that's the big difference between now and then. Now in 2024, secondhand fashion is no longer just a niche interest. Right? It's become totally mainstream.

[Sheena Butler Young]

It's funny because I have a version of what Kat just shared, like a different version of that story. I remember I was interviewing for my first fashion editorial job in New York a little more than a decade ago, and I didn't have a ton of money. I didn't know what I was going to wear, but I wanted it to be like something designer and conversational. So I went to a thrift shop. I was going to be covering footwear, so I went to a thrift shop and I got a pair of this is kind of corny, but Manolo Blahnik pumps, and I was going to wear them. I thought it would be like a nice conversation starter. I did wear them, but ahead of my interview, I told a friend of mine that what I had done, she said, oh, that's going to be embarrassing for you. They might judge you that you didn't go to the real brand and support it, but you went to a thrift shop instead. And it's funny because I think that's the opposite. And this was a decade ago. Kat talked about being in high school or about 15 years ago, but I remember that feeling. I had to wear them. I had nothing else. But I feel like that's so different today.

[Kat Chen]

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

[Brian Baskin]

When did that stigma start to go away? What changed?

[Kat Chen]

It's hard to say because personally, that, like, very snooty attitude toward. Oh, well, where'd you get that? It has felt so tone deaf to me personally for a very long time. But I do think, though, the destigmatization of resale, a large part of the equation is how easy it is to shop and sell second hand. I think today secondhand fashion is ubiquitous. You go on the subway and you see ads for Mercury or for ebay. And there are dozens of platforms that do peer to peer shopping options where you can buy something secondhand for, you know, at a fraction of the cost of retail, or you can sell something that you've had for a while. And, you know, if I want to buy a pair of boots, there's Vestier Collective, Poshmark. Depop brands are selling their own secondhand pieces powered by B2B companies like Trove and Archive. And all of these options are available to me for both when I want to buy or when I want to sell. And so when resale is top of mind like that, I think the market adapts to that acceptance mentality.

[Sheena Butler Young]

I feel like sustainability or the idea that it is more sustainable has also helped destigmatize it. It went from this idea that you're not supporting a by going and buying it on the secondhand market to actually you're doing good for the planet. Is that a factor?

[Kat Chen]

I think so, although I feel like it's less salient than we would like to believe it is. You know, we've covered this idea of cognitive dissonance among shoppers. Right. Shoppers say they want to be sustainable, they want to be more conscious about what they're buying, and yet you see fast fashion growing at an insanely rapid pace. But I think that it's a confluence of things, Sheena. Sustainability is definitely part of it. I mean, people love to be rewarded or to feel rewarded for a purchase that they've made. And I think the narrative of resale being sustainable certainly serves that good feel moment when they buy something secondhand rather than primary. Whether resale is sustainable, actually sustainable, whether it has had an effect on fashion's overall carbon footprint, that has not been proven, that has not been demonstrated.

[Brian Baskin]

Yeah, and some people argue it may even be encouraging people to consume more because as I was saying before, they're so confident they can resell whatever they're buying that they're buying new and resale and they're not really reducing consumption at all.

[Kat Chen]

Oh, absolutely.

[Sheena Butler Young]

The narrative of it all is the perfect word. I don't think I saved the planet with my Manolo Blahnik purchase.

[Brian Baskin]

Oh, I think you did, Sheena, for sure.

[Kat Chen]

I mean, I think that's the most interesting question about the resale sector today is could resale ever replace even a fraction of the volume of primary apparel production? Because in order to demonstrate that resale is actually good for the planet, it would need to have an impact on output. And from a bird's eye view, it needs to divert the industry's carbon footprint. And so far there are no signs of this. But I do think there are some promising bits going on. So, for instance, Patagonia is really doubling down on its resale program as part of its efforts to curb, not necessarily growth, but the impact of growth on the planet. There are a few smaller brands whose resale programs are now totally profitable, which is really interesting because resale is notoriously online. Resale is notoriously difficult to operate profitably. So the fact that that's happening, I think that's a really promising sign.

[Brian Baskin]

Something you said earlier really struck me when you were talking about you're on the subway and you see all these ads for these different resale platforms. It feels like we're in this odd place where this is a market that it's almost, I would say, a mature market at this point. It's, you know, online resale has been around for a decade, 15 years. I don't know. I don't know when the RealReal was founded at least a decade ago. And at the same time, there are constantly new services starting up. I mean, I was just at Voices, our annual conference in the uk, and, you know, every room you went into that, you feel like you met five different founders of different resale platforms that were just emerging or services for resale. Where are we in the life cycle of this market.

[Kat Chen]

Yeah, that's also a very interesting question, Brian. I think 15 years ago, when the RealReal came onto the scene for online fashion resale, there was really only one player around, and that was ebay. And part of the RealReal's hypothesis and its proposition to investors was that it could become the dominant service provider for luxury secondhand fashion. And that was sort of its hypothesis even leading up to its IPO in 2021. But in the years since, what we found is that there really isn't a market leader in fashion resale, or there hasn't been a market leader in fashion resale. And instead, we have dozens of these new platforms popping up every day, and they're all undermining each other. Right. And it's become kind of a race to the bottom. I'm working on a story about commission fees and how commission fee structures have changed so much in the past two years because there's so much competition for customers.

[Brian Baskin]

And that creates some tension, right, between the platforms and their customers. I mean, tell us what happened with Poshmark recently.

[Kat Chen]

Not so long ago, Poshmark announced that it would be placing some of the commission fees onto the shoppers to better incentivize sellers. And there's a lot of competition on the seller front because there's always demand for secondhand items. They're cheaper. But the supply end is where a lot of platforms struggle with. Basically, the original policy was that sellers are charged a 20% fee on everything that they sell. But in order to incentivize more sellers, more supply onto the platform, Poshmark imposed a portion of that seller fee onto the buyer. So then prices of the goods sold on Poshmark went up, and immediately this had an effect on its sales. A little over two weeks after this new fee structure was imposed, Poshmark switched it back. And I think this just shows how willing they were to take this ginormous risk in order to incentivize people to sell on the platform. Because there are just so many other options out there. You know, am I going to make more money selling on Poshmark, or am I going to make more money selling on ebay? And all of these platforms are trying to draw me in with how much money I can make on each sale.

[Brian Baskin]

It seems like it's very difficult to squeeze more money out of this business, even if you're one of the biggest players in it. And the reason is because, like you said before, there's always someone new coming along. I mean, my favorite Example of this is this marketplace Vinted, which is. Came out of Lithuania and it's been around a while, but it wasn't really on my radar, especially being in the US where they don't have as big a presence, but they're apparently huge in Europe. They're challenging Vestier Collective, which is the established resale player there, and then a month ago, they announced a 5 billion euros valuation again. For a company that I'm someone who's been covering resale off and on for a while, had really. We'd never written about it. Like, they're not, you know, maybe that's a failing on our part, I guess. But, you know, they kind of came out of nowhere and now they're the biggest player in Europe, potentially.

[Kat Chen]

Yeah, absolutely. They're actually making a pretty big push in the US as well. And yeah, it's really interesting. I think the learning for operators of these platforms is that there's very little consumer loyalty in this space. Like, when I consider selling something, I am going to consider every single one of these platforms, basically, whichever one that I'm going to get the best, the quickest sale, the easiest sale, and then of course, what I can recoup, you know, how much am I making on my sale?

[Sheena Butler Young]

It's funny because you two things you said earlier, there's no market leader right now. A lot of these platforms are racing to the bottom. What is incentivizing businesses to launch a new resale platform every day, every week, every month? What are they after? What are they hoping to gain? Where is the real opportunity?

[Kat Chen]

I think for the platform operators, there is white space in the market. If you have the investment capital to pour into marketing to appeal to consumers, who, by the way, you know, it's a tough economic climate. I think people today are actually even more interested in resale than they were, you know, two, three years ago, right out of the pandemic. I think for brands, the proposition is different. I think that resale has been the vehicle of a lot of greenwashing tactics, using resale as a means of curbing their carbon footprint, putting it into their climate reports. You know, even though that has not been measured, even though that, you know, these very small brands operating even smaller resale programs that haven't had really an effect on their production, on their bottom lines. But we continue to see brands invest in this space. And I do think that there are players with really great intentions earnestly developing resale programs to be profitable, to maybe one day diminish their overall production.

[Sheena Butler Young]

Is there a core Resale customer right now. I hear you on that. It's grown so much and it's been embraced broadly. But is there a core demographic, a core customer?

[Kat Chen]

My first instinct is to say young consumers, Gen Z consumers. Brian was sort of talking about the shopping literacy that people have today where, you know, if you're shopping for a plain T shirt, you'll go somewhere affordable and mainstream. Maybe you go to Uniqlo, but if you're shopping for an occasion, maybe you want to splurge on a Simone Rocha dress. But before you make that purchase, you're going to look on Poshmark and you're going to look on the realreal to see what that dress is going to fetch when you sell it. And so in your head, you feel a sense of security going into that purchase knowing that you'll be able to recoup the cost of it. I think that mentality, that savviness isn't just young consumers anymore. I mean, it's me. I don't know about you, Sheena, but I also think about resale all the time in terms of both buying and selling.

[Sheena Butler Young]

Oh, for sure. But I also consider myself a young consumer.

[Kat Chen]

So there you go.

[Brian Baskin]

Why are we laughing? Come on.

[Sheena Butler Young]

I know. We'll be back with more of the debrief right after this.

[Malik Morris]

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[Brian Baskin]

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[Sheena Butler Young]

So now we're going to shift gears to another topic, which is reselling the unsellable. Joining us now is E Commerce correspondent Malik Morris to talk about how new software platforms are emerging to help fashion brands turn damaged return goods into new sales. But do new solutions truly address the problem or just shift it around? That's the idea. But I want to open this with the, the scale or the magnitude of online returns as an issue. How big is it, Malik? And how have brands managed it to this point?

[Malik Morris]

Hi. Thank you so much for having me back. Yeah, it's, it is a huge problem. I actually did a case study last year about online returns, and something I learned during that process was that most things that consumers send back to brands that they bought online can't just be dusted off and put back on a shelf. That was news to me because I worked in physical retail and we took products back and immediately we sold them, sometimes in the same day. Sometimes one customer came in and bought back a shoe and the other customer, oh, that's the size I need. Can I have that, please? When it comes to E Commerce, unsellable inventory could be, you know, as severe as having tons of stains on them or as small as a pull thread. Or even a customer's, like, lingering scent could make it unsellable. And it's not just about returns either. Sometimes things can go wrong on the handling of products. You know, you accidentally break off a button on a shirt or something when you're unboxing, you know, a package or inputting the items on the shelves or, you know, an item on display in a window in a store gets sun damaged and all those goods usually get what we call on retail damaged out. And, you know, it may get donated or more likely end up in the landfill. But the brand, of course, takes a loss on that item. So that's what we mean when we talk about unsellable inventory. And it's quite a huge and large scale problem.

[Sheena Butler Young]

And then you have these providers like Bazaar and Revive that have launched recently. What is their premise?

[Malik Morris]

So, you know, they're part of this group of return software firms that streamlines the reverse logistics process. In some ways it is quite novel, but in some ways it's on the heels of firms that have existed for a long time, you know, like Optora or Loop Returns, that basically make it easy for consumers to drop returns off at like a Staples or other retailers. And they give brands the tools to offer quick refunds or easily process exchanges online. But they also help brands and retailers figure out what to do with unsellable products either through donations, recycling or reselling them. And those companies, like Uptoro and Loop Returns, they traffic in all product categories, but particularly in electronics is where, you know, that proposition of reselling unsellable products typically shines for them. But that last piece is really tricky for fashion brands because, you know, the smallest thing can make something unsellable. Like I said before a snack thread and so on and so forth. But in my story, I do talk about these newer platforms, you know, including Bazaar and Revive, that are specifically helping fashion brands take those unsellable goods and resell them at a discount. Revive, for one, they're a little bit more traditional. And being a software firm that helps brands refurbish the return goods and other things in the inventory to be resold on their own site or through resellers like Poshmark. But the model that's really novel here is Bazaar, which has a marketplace, a front facing marketplace like a RealReal or Poshmark, where brands can directly list their products that can be resold or offload excess inventories. And these options feel tailored to fashion and have an understanding of the complexity of what makes an item not worthy of being resold as, as new or at full price and serves as some sort of a remedy to that ongoing conundrum.

[Brian Baskin]

And Bizaar is working with some fast fashion sellers like Cider, which a lot of the traditional resale sites have explicitly said they don't want that essentially cluttering up their listings. And that's actually a specialty at Bazaar, right?

[Malik Morris]

Yeah, that is a part of their specialty is like being able to. So they traffic in helping brands that sell product for less than $200, where honestly at that price point brands are often like, screw it, you know, like just throw it and burn it. Like, we're not going to make any money off of trying to refurbish this. And that obviously includes fast fashion, you know, platforms and plastic fashion, you know, retailers like Cider and others but there's also, you know, some in the middle, like Halara, you know, that's like had a viral moment with Taylor Swift earlier this year and opened pop up store they wrote about and they sell products addresses for like $40. So like you know, not rock bottom shein prices but again still at a price point where if something gets resold and has a bit of a scene on it, it just doesn't make sense for them to try to refurbish it and resell it. And now Bazaar is coming in with a proposition saying hey, we can offload that and put it on the site. And also it's good to clarify with Bazaar that they don't go through the trouble of necessarily fixing item. They kind of list it as is and the customer is kind of what you see, what you get was very similar to the proposition of like a real rail was like they have a range, a spectrum of conditions, you know, from fair to pristine. And you know, the price obviously reflects that. And so there is a level of transparency there which is supposed to be a part of the proposition of sustainability and a part of the proposition of resale as well.

[Kat Chen]

By the way, I do see brands going directly to resale platforms to offload inventory. You know, this is something that's not addressed explicitly, but when you see ten dresses of the same size of the same brands tags attached on the RealReal, it's definitely either the brand or retailer offloading that inventory.

[Malik Morris]

And that is also part of like a big part of what revive helps to do. Like they have the refurbished part of their business, but they also, like Kat is saying, like connecting these brands to the poshmarks of the world and offloading that inventory that they can't get rid of.

[Brian Baskin]

Yeah, I think that's why Bazaar is so interesting because they're taking this practice which has gone on, I mean probably gone on well before even online resale was a thing. You're just quietly disposing of returned merchandise wherever you can and they're kind of bringing it out in the open and sort of like the RealReal did 15 years ago, trying to remove some of the stigma around buying something that was returned and maybe slightly off from what you'd see in the store.

[Malik Morris]

Yeah. And what's interesting too is that, you know, there's this idea that youth culture, the stigma of buying something secondhand is gone for them. And if you look at Bazaar and their site, the colors and the brightness and the brands that they carry are definitely youth oriented. And so even at a price point of less than $200 because consumers don't really care if like, oh, I'll buy this dress that's now from Halara, that's at a discount and maybe had a little bit of a saying on it, like, it's totally fine, I'll take it to the dry cleaners. And so they're really capitalizing on this shift in consumer behavior in recent years.

[Sheena Butler Young]

I want to get back to the premise of brands maybe engaging with these platforms so that they can actually monetize their returns. I found this quote really interesting from Annie Hu, Bazaar's co founder and chief executive in your story, Malik. She said if brands do the math internally, they might find out that without Bazaar, it's actually cheaper to just let something accumulate in a warehouse and not do anything with it. But even so, they're still losing money. I find that confusing. Is it helping brands do something with returns that makes it less loss making? Is it really doing that?

[Malik Morris]

Yes, I can see why it's confusing. But the ultimate loss of the fact that this is, this is a bunch of product that's not resellable. So you, you're losing money on items that you're not able to get to the consumer. And whatever the cost is of operating your own platform, the cost is of investing in a platform like Bazaar and the fee that they take or in, you know, revive and their software service at the end, that you're still going to recoup a lot of money that will be lost with items that are just going to be burned or have to be donated for which you can't make a new sale on. So I get what she's saying where it's like, if you don't invest in these kinds of platforms, then the solution is all that money just goes up in flames, literally.

[Sheena Butler Young]

And also maybe introducing it to some new customers who may not come into your store through a platform like Bazaar versus waiting to have customers discover you by going online or going into a store. Right?

[Malik Morris]

Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, and I can imagine Kat can attest to this too. Like when you talk about platforms like Shrove or Archive, which helps, you know, brands like Levi's and Patagonia build their own resale programs like either through refurbishing return goods or through buybacks where customers come in and say, I've had this for 10 years and I want to sell it back to you and they get, you know, a store credit or they, you know, get cash or what have you. Obviously the buyback program is different, is usually existing customers, but it is a way for a new customer that maybe can't afford your product at full price to come in and buy. And then those consumers with these platforms have found usually graduate into buying new items down the line, especially as they get older and they're, you know, they come into their purchasing power more. So it really is a great customer acquisition tool as well.

[Brian Baskin]

So just to wrap things up here, I thought we could each give an idea for where we think resale is headed, what the next big development was going to be. And since I just sprang this on you guys, I will start first and give you guys a bit of time to think. My opinion is that this market is going to continue to flatten out. There's not going to be some resale giant that emerges. I think the more likely development is we'll get some sort of product search that goes across platforms and people will stop even knowing what a lot of these platforms even are, where they're buying something. They'll just know they found the product they want and what it will cost. And I think that's going to force a lot of these resale sites to differentiate themselves in other ways. They're going to have to have a tighter edit. They're going to need to be the essence of retail or the mytheresa of resale or they're just gonna need to get more audacious. I mean, we saw a taste of that with Vestier Collective doing this big partnership with Emily in Paris and just splashing themselves all over this hit TV show on Netflix. Like they're really having to ramp up how they brand themselves. I think in reaction to what's coming here, which is that as Kat said before, nobody really cares where you buy something, they just wanna buy it. Sheena, what do you think? Where are we going?

[Sheena Butler Young]

An interesting development to watch for me comes from a story I recently covered which is how brands are thinking about who should own resale within their company. So like there's now this role of a. It's not a real title, but it's a title that brands have been using casually, which is the CEO of resale. I think that opportunity to have talent touch resale and learn cross functional skills like marketing, supply chain, E commerce can actually be interesting. What that turns into, I don't know. I think how brands leverage resale's cross functional skill set can be interesting to watch in the future.

[Kat Chen]

I love both of your predictions. I'm gonna cheat a little bit and cite someone else. In a conversation that I had this morning with one of her Fellows about resale. And she has noticed, and I think this is so fascinating, she has noticed that there is backlash against some resellers either selling things that are priced too high. And I mean, this is a common refrain in New York. You know, people always say, I don't shop resale in New York. I mean, I don't really shop thrift in New York because it is really expensive. So there's a bit of a pricing ceiling that we're seeing. But also there are sellers on peer to peer services like depop who are essentially being very duplicitous and buying fast fashion, taking off the tag and then calling it vintage. This is something that I've seen on Twitter as well. I don't know how widespread it is, but you know, we're seeing these hiccups in resale where this, this ecosystem is being exploited a little bit. I mean, we haven't talked about counterfeits, but the resale industry is why counterfeiting is so, so rampant in the industry. But yeah, I think in the coming months, in the coming years, there's going to be guardrails against these misuses of resale.

[Malik Morris]

Yeah. And that's interesting, Kat, because I feel like if those guardrails would be the brands kind of taking it on more themselves, that kind of in the vein of what, you know, Sheena was talking about like a CEO of resale at some of these companies. And also you know, what Brian was talking about, like the problem of there not being enough differentiation or enough of a sustainable proposition for the platforms, you know, dedicated to resale. And a lot of my reporting is focused on how brands can run a more profitable business. And if resale can prove that it is an avenue for them to achieve this, you know, whether it's through working with the companies like revive to help them resell, you know, return merchandise. And I can see it becoming a bigger priority for brands which will make the shopping experience all the better for consumers who can just go directly to their favorite places, their favorite brands and shop items that are more affordable and also feel like they're doing good for the planet. And then obviously that leads to an increase in sales and then it can further validate and expand the resale economy beyond, you know, a litany of players who are dedicated to creating marketplaces solely for resale.

[Brian Baskin]

Malik. Kat, thank you so much for joining us today.

[Kat Chen]

Thank you for having us.

[Malik Morris]

Thank you.

[Brian Baskin]

Please be sure to check out Malik's article. Fashion's big opportunity in Reselling the Unsellable these and other stories are available to BOF Professional subscribers and you can find the link in the episode notes. You've been listening to the debrief, produced by Olivia Davies, edited and mixed by Eric Eric Bria. I'm Brian Baskin.

[Sheena Butler Young]

And I'm Sheena Butler Young. We'll be back next week with a new episode. Thanks so much for joining us and be sure to follow us wherever you get your podcasts.

[Malik Morris]

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