S5E11 ThredUp’s Resale Revolution: Holiday Shopping & Gift Giving Trends with Alon Rotem

The holidays are here and resale is at the center of this year’s shopping story! In this timely episode of The Retail Razor Show, Ricardo Belmar and Casey Golden sit down with Alon Rotem, Chief Strategy Officer at ThredUp, to unpack the company’s 2025 Holiday Shopping Report. From surprising insights on resale gift giving to how shoppers are embracing sustainable fashion and circular economy models, this conversation reveals why resale is becoming a mainstream holiday shopping strategy.

We also explore ThredUp’s evolution from a secondhand marketplace to a Resale as a Service (RaaS) leader, powering branded resale programs for fashion retailers. Alon shares how ThredUp’s AI-powered innovations — including image search, natural language search, and personalized curation — are transforming the secondhand shopping experience and driving conversion.

If you want to understand how resale, sustainability, and AI are reshaping holiday shopping in 2025, this episode delivers insights every retailer, brand, and shopper needs.

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About our Guest

Alon Rotem, Chief Strategy Officer & General Counsel, ThredUp

Alon Rotem has served as ThredUp’s Chief Strategy Officer and General Counsel since September 2024. Alon has also served as Chief Legal Officer since February 2021 and Secretary since March 2017 and previously served as General Counsel from January 2017 to February 2021. From September 2013 to November 2016, Alon served as the General Counsel of Rocket Lawyer Inc., an online legal technology company. From June 2010 to August 2013, he was an associate at Goodwin Procter LLP, a global law firm. Alon holds a Juris Doctor from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law and a Bachelor of Science in Managerial Economics from the University of California, Davis.

ThredUp 2025 Holiday Report - https://newsroom.thredup.com/news/thredup-2025-holiday-report

ThredUp Resale-as-a-Service - https://www.raas.thredup.com

Chapters

00:00 Previews

01:13 Show Intro

04:51 Welcome, Alon Rotem - Chief Strategy Officer, ThredUp

08:38 ThredUp's Evolution and Resale as a Service

15:51 Implementing Resale Programs with ThredUp

21:31 Challenges and Successes of Going Public

25:36 AI Innovations in ThredUp's Shopping Experience

33:06 Insights from the Holiday Report

35:25 Consumer Behavior and Secondhand Gifts

36:24 Top Gifting Trends in Resale

39:49 The Role of Data in Resale

41:32 Consumer Funding for Holiday Shopping

47:21 Luxury vs. Mid-Market Resale

51:05 Sustainability and the Future of Fashion

55:11 Future Outlook 59:47 Show Close

Meet your hosts, helping you cut through the clutter in retail & retail tech:

Ricardo Belmar is an NRF Top Retail Voices for 2025 & a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2021 – 2025. Thinkers 360 has named him a Top 10 Retail, & AGI Thought Leader, a Top 50 Management, Transformation, & Careers Thought Leader, a Top 100 Digital Transformation & Agentic AI Thought Leader, plus a Top Digital Voice for 2024 and 2025. He is an advisory council member at George Mason University’s Center for Retail Transformation, and the Retail Cloud Alliance. He was most recently the director partner marketing for retail & consumer goods in the Americas at Microsoft.

Casey Golden, is CEO of Luxlock, a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2023 - 2025, and a Retail Cloud Allianceadvisory council member. Obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, now slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech! Currently, Casey is the North America Leader for Retail & Consumer Goods at CI&T.

Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring Overclocked, and E-Motive from the album Beat Hype, written by Heston Mimms, published by Imuno.