Luxury Briefing: Luxury resale saturation is changing how people shop

It’s an evolution of resale’s tall growth over the last five years. A few major platforms like StockX and The RealReal grew rapidly and became publicly traded. Now, resale is growing wide. New resale channels are showing up everywhere from physical locations like Disney World to online channels like TikTok Shop and brand websites.

Vidyuth Srinivasan, founder and CEO of Entrupy, the resale authentication tech company that works with hundreds of resellers in 90 countries, said the market accessibility of resale has “expanded massively” in the last two years.

“It’s not just established businesses like physical and online stores; resale is [catching on] as a personal project or side hustle for a lot of people,” Srinivasan said. “Options for buying and selling are so plentiful. It’s caused a lot of people to be more conscious of what’s in their closet. When they buy new, they’re aware that they can sell it later. … More inventories are for sale, more closets are open.”

According to ThredUp’s 2024 Resale Report, more than 60% of consumers in the U.S. have made a secondhand fashion purchase in the last year. Ninety percent of retail executives surveyed by ThredUp said their customers are already engaging with resale. And those shoppers reported a wide range of preferred resale sources, with a near-even split between social media, online stores, branded resale channels, livestream platforms and marketplaces. Similar results have come from third parties — a March 2024 E-Commerce Database report showed that 60% of U.K. shoppers have bought secondhand in the prior year.

Resale has blown up on social commerce, especially on TikTok Shop. In 2023, luxury resale marketplace MyGemma brought in 15% of its total revenue from livestreams on TikTok, Instagram and Whatnot.

On April 21, Detoure, a 3-year-old luxury resale company with a focus on influencers as sellers, is opening a store on Melrose Avenue. Neighboring stores include AllSaints, Vivienne Westwood, Marc Jacobs and John Varvatos. The store will sell pre-owned fashions at 40-70% off their retail price.

“We were an online business first, but our growth took off around two years ago when we started doing pop-ups around L.A.,” said Detoure founder Meghan Russell. “Five hundred people were showing up in one day. One pop-up in Orange County had over 1,000 people at once. There’s a huge appetite for resale in brick-and-mortar, especially from companies with a lot of brands to choose from.”

Resale giant The RealReal is closing stores amid its ongoing effort to cut costs and stay profitable, but many resale companies are expanding their physical presence including through partners.

Resale boutique What Goes Around Comes Around now operates a shop in the Epcot section of Disney World and sells through Southern department store Dillard’s, among other retail partners. Srinivasan said Entrupy works with multiple resellers who have shops installed on cruise ships. Travel retailer ARI has opened multiple pre-owned luxury stores called Reloved in airports in Canada and Portugal. And Bob’s Watches, one of the largest watch resellers in the world, recently opened a store in Las Vegas’s Harry Reid International Airport. At the time of the launch in March, Bob’s Watches chief commercial officer Douglas Kaplan told Glossy that international customers “increasingly see airports as a shopping destination,” making them a perfect fit for resale.

But the numerous options for buying and selling pre-owned luxury goods make authenticating and policing counterfeit goods exponentially more difficult.

Srinivasan said he hopes brands will embrace a philosophy of “interoperability,” creating more transparent and standardized tools for resale platforms to authenticate their goods.

“Resellers’ goals and brands’ goals are similar: to make transactions trustworthy and prevent the sale of counterfeits,” Srinivasan said. “The only way to make that easier is to have more cooperation and transparency between both sides.”

LVMH takes a hit

All through the luxury downturn at the end of 2023, one thing was constant: LVMH was immune to the problems. While other luxury companies reported lower spending, the French titan of luxury and fashion managed to keep growing.

But in earnings reported Wednesday, LVMH revealed that sales had fallen by around 2% in the first quarter of 2024. The biggest revenue dropoff came from the wines and spirits category, followed by watches and jewelry. And brands including Dior underperformed, dragging down sales. Fashion revenue did grow, but only a modest 2%.

LVMH has pushed its prices higher over the last few years, with some of its bags selling for as much as 50% more than in 2019. That combined with the harsher economic climate no doubt impacted its sales.

But LVMH still fared better than the average in luxury. According to data released this week from Bank of America, luxury spending across the U.S. was down 12% in March.

“Luxury brands have seen a natural slowdown, in line with the larger macroeconomic inflationary environment after three years of hyper-growth in the pandemic,” said Juan Pellerano, CMO at retail tech company Swap. “We expect conglomerates with diversified portfolios, as LVMH does, to weather this uncertain economic and geopolitical climate better than most. However, this will likely be an industry-wide slowdown through the end of the year.”

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