With Secondhand September in full swing, what better time to take the pulse of the fashion resale market?
Secondhand platforms have dedicated significant resources this year to upping their cultural cachet, elevating pre-loved and bringing it front of mind for consumers. This is a core part of Ebay’s fashion strategy, which has included pre-loved runways during New York and London fashion weeks, celebrity ambassadors wearing custom secondhand looks on the red carpet and a major sponsorship of reality dating show Love Island. It’s all about “leaning in where the momentum is strongest”, Ebay CEO Jamie Iannone told Vogue Business last week.
Vinted has also been playing in the luxury fashion game. In March, the secondhand platform — which is best known for its mass appeal and low prices — hosted its first-ever physical pop-up in London, rebranding a townhouse as the ‘House of Vinted’ and populating it with luxury goods, sourced or sold by content creators. The pre-loved finds were then sold via Vinted, with proceeds going to Oxfam, whose secondhand fashion show slot at London Fashion Week on Thursday will be sponsored by Vinted. The platform also just announced a secondhand spin on design shows like Project Runway, dubbed Re/Style, which will premiere on Prime Video UK in October.
An early pioneer of fashion resale, Ebay is celebrating its anniversary by cementing its place in culture. But re-commerce has many of the same challenges as the primary market, says CEO Jamie Iannone.
Resale platforms have been raising their profile among policymakers, too. Parisian resale platform Vestiaire Collective was an early lobbying force for circular fashion, working with US-Ghanaian textile waste non-profit The Or Foundation to advocate for globally accountable extended producer responsibility (EPR) since 2023, and promoting transparency in textile waste exports alongside local organisation Paris Good Fashion. In November 2022, the platform also banned ultra-fast fashion, later expanding its ban to include another 30 fast fashion brands, several years ahead of France’s proposed anti-fast fashion bill.
In the US, Thredup has been supporting the yet-to-pass New York Fashion Act, and co-authored the Americas Act, which includes $14 billion in incentives for the circular fashion and textile recycling sectors. It has worked continuously with American Circular Textiles (ACT), joining congressional briefings in Washington DC and launching the Slow Fashion Caucus in June 2024 to emphasise what it calls “the critical need for public policy to accelerate the transition to a sustainable fashion future”.
Outside of public policy, resale platforms are helping to scale circular innovations. In October 2024, Ebay expanded its Circular Fashion Fund to the US and Germany, following a two-year pilot in the UK and another one-year pilot in Australia. The fund is designed to help fashion startups scale, including rental and repair services. By 2025, Ebay plans to invest $1.2 million through this vehicle, providing recipients with over 200 hours of expert mentoring and networking support in the process. Vinted is also hoping to help scale the next generation of circular startups, having launched an investment fund, Vinted Ventures, in March.
All of this influence — and investment — is made possible because secondhand sales are growing at a healthy pace, as we discovered when reading through the latest financial, impact and trend reports from leading resale platforms Thredup, Ebay, The RealReal, Vinted, Depop and Vestiaire Collective (all published within the past 12 months). But proving environmental impact — the supposed driving force behind all of these platforms — remains a challenge.
Resale platforms’ growth in numbers
With President Trump’s tariffs pushing up prices in the primary market, circular fashion is hoping to reap the benefits, leveraging stock that is already in the country. Likewise, rising concerns about the quality of luxury products — and whether or not they’re worth the price tag — seems to be pushing people towards secondhand. Some 33 per cent of all clothing and apparel purchases in the US over the past year were secondhand, bringing the market value to an estimated $56 billion, up 14.3 per cent from 2024, according to research by deal-finding platform Capital One Shopping, referenced in The RealReal’s 2025 impact report.
This uptick is reflected in the reports. For example, The RealReal, which hit a rocky patch after its IPO in 2019, has been through a restructuring and major investment in marketing, which has helped to attract higher earners (and therefore higher spenders) to the site. Among new sign-ups to The RealReal in 2024, 40 per cent have a household income above $150,000.
As of December 2024, The RealReal had generated around $1.8 billion in GMV, having sold over 40 million items in total since its founding in 2011. It said 10,000 products drop each day, contributing to an average order value of more than $500. The RealReal became profitable for the first time in the fourth quarter of 2023. For full-year 2024, its adjusted EBITDA totalled $9.3 million, a significant improvement from losses of $55.2 million in 2023 and $112.5 million in 2022.
Over the past year, Vinted has been branching out from its mainstream fashion origins, adding a luxury vertical and expanding its remit to household goods and electricals. In October 2024, the platform secured a secondary share sale valuing the company at €5 billion. Its full-year 2024 financial report reinforced this valuation. In 2024, Vinted Group delivered consolidated revenue of €813.4 million, a 36 per cent increase from 2023. The group, which includes the Vinted Marketplace, payment system Vinted Pay and logistics branch Vinted Go, reported a net profit of €76.7 million, up 330 per cent from 2023 (€17.8 million). Adjusted EBITDA was €158.9 million, compared to €76.6 million in 2023.
Ebay has been making an effort to integrate pre-loved into the cultural zeitgeist and elevate it in traditional fashion spaces. As a result, it generated over 2.3 billion listings in 2024 across 1.3 million active buyers. In the second quarter of 2025, Ebay’s total GMV reached $19.5 billion, of which 40 per cent came from pre-loved and refurbished products. In the same period, sales of “thrifted” clothing, shoes and accessories surged 400 per cent globally compared to the year prior. Total revenue in Q2 stood at $2.7 billion, up 6 per cent on a reported basis.
Some 77 per cent of Ebay customers surveyed in its 2024 Recommerce report agreed that they are shopping secondhand more frequently. Among the reasons given were saving money (62 per cent), sustainability and environmental benefits (26 per cent), being unable to find a specific item new (25 per cent), brands being more affordable when pre-loved (24 per cent), and looking for unique or collectible items (18 per cent). Millennials shopped secondhand most frequently, with 9 per cent buying something pre-loved on a weekly basis, and 24 per cent on a monthly basis. Gen Z also demonstrated significant engagement, with 21 per cent shopping for pre-loved items once a month.
Thredup attributes this year’s growth to increased engagement with policymakers and investments in AI and social commerce, helping to win new customers. The company says it has processed 230 million secondhand items to date, generating $260 million in total revenue from continuing operations in 2024. It has some 66,000 brands listed on its platform, with over 50 brands using its Resale-as-a-Service (RaaS) programme, including Reformation, Gap, H&M, Madewell and Christy Dawn. These brands contribute around 2.3 million items to its annual tally.
Vestiaire Collective is a private company and therefore does not report its financial performance in detail, but says it experienced a 25 per cent uptick in revenue year-on-year from 2023 to 2024.
Together, the reports show that resale has moved from niche and often loss-making, to a mainstream and profitable channel, which is increasingly diversified.
Which brands are benefitting from the resale boom?
The most popular brands on fashion resale platforms often mirror the primary market, albeit with a slight slant towards those considered more timeless. Ebay’s Watchlist trend report for January to March 2025 revealed Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Burberry, Prada and Chanel as the top-performing brands. Vestiaire Collective reported similar, although its list was split into categories. Gucci, Louis Vuitton and Chanel topped the luxury group, while Moncler, Jacquemus and Vivienne Westwood reigned in the designer category, and premium was dominated by Coach, Golden Goose and Longchamp.
Perhaps more telling is the list of brands on the rise. According to The RealReal, Coach saw a 160 per cent increase in searches last year, followed by Ferragamo (129 per cent), Pucci (111 per cent), Toteme (82 per cent) and Roberto Cavalli (62 per cent).
The buzziest creative director of 2024 was Jonathan Anderson (no surprise there), with Loewe sales more than tripling in the past three years and new buyers up 77 per cent compared to the year prior, per The RealReal. When Anderson announced his departure from Loewe in March, searches for the brand increased 488 per cent in the same day. In fact, the comings and goings of creative directors often prompt an uptick in secondhand searches: Proenza Schouler went up 37 per cent the week Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez exited, Bally surged by 60 per cent year-on-year when Simone Bellotti stepped down, and searches for Dior jumped by 114 per cent with the news that Maria Grazia Chiuri vacated her post.
Recent resale reports also suggest that consumers are increasingly looking to fulfil their desires for current trends on the secondhand market, implying that secondhand could be displacing some new purchases, even if the churn-through rate remains similar to fast fashion. On The RealReal, searches for “bag charms” spiked by 470 per cent year-on-year in 2025, as the TikTok-originated trend for chaotic customisation took hold. Similarly, Ebay saw 85 times as many searches for “Labubu charm” in March 2025 than the year prior, as the toy craze seeped into the secondhand realm.
Replacing fast fashion or adding to the noise?
For years, the thorn in the side of secondhand fashion platforms was the struggle to prove their impact. The key metric is displacement rate, the rate at which secondhand purchases directly replace new purchases, therefore ‘saving’ the emissions associated with new production. But calculating this is no small feat, especially when the primary market doesn’t have sufficient lifecycle assessment (LCA) data to shout about ‘avoided emissions’ with any certainty.
Earlier this year, UK-based circularity non-profit Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) released a methodology for calculating and comparing the displacement rate of circular business models, hoping to harmonise the back-of-the-envelope calculations that brands and platforms have created in the meantime.
Depop was an early adopter of WRAP’s methodology, and now regularly uses it to publish its own displacement report. The latest claims Depop has a displacement rate of 64 per cent in the US, 68 per cent in the UK and 72 per cent in Australia. Vestiaire Collective, which works with impact measurement startup Vaayu to calculate its displacement rate, says its overall rate is at 79 per cent. It also claims that each purchase on Vestiaire Collective saves 90 per cent of the environmental impact of a new purchase, and the platform “prevents three times more emissions than [we] generate”.
The actual number of avoided emissions varies wildly between platforms, depending on their size and reporting preferences. Vestiaire Collective says it has avoided 242,000 tonnes of CO2e since 2009, 25 per cent of which was in 2023 alone, equating to 100,000 flights from Paris to New York. Vinted, which also partners with Vaayu, says its avoided emissions in 2023 topped 679,000 tonnes of CO2e, the same as flying from London to LA 512,414 times.
The hope is that digital product passports (DPPs), which will be enforced across the European Union from 2026, will bring a level of transparency, allowing circular fashion businesses to prove their impact once and for all by tracking the lifecycle of a product from cradle to grave.
Ebay, at least, is optimistic. In June, the re-commerce site published a report with consulting firm Bain Co, which suggested that DPPs could unlock higher resale prices by proving authenticity and usage history, with consumers recouping 65 per cent of this added value. “DPPs are critical to powering the future of circularity in fashion,” Alexis Hoopes, VP of global fashion at Ebay, said in a statement at the time. Until then, while resale is booming, the full environmental impact remains unclear.
In the meantime, the latest reports show the resale market is entering a phase of maturity, and platforms are using this newfound wealth and influence to embed resale deeper into culture and politics. As The RealReal president and CEO Rati Levesque wrote in the platform’s latest resale report: “While the future remains uncertain, one thing feels clear: we believe resale is no longer reacting to the fashion industry, but driving it.”
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