Growth in the US secondhand market is predicted to slow down despite widespread adoption in 2022

Last year, you couldn’t go a week without a brand launching a resale platform, quite literally.

In 2022, 88 brands introduced resale programs during a year the US secondhand market saw $39 billion in sales compared to $35 billion in 2021, according to ThredUp’s latest annual resale report in partnership with Global data.

• The report predicts the US secondhand market will reach $70 billion by 2027, growing nine times faster than the broader apparel sector.
• Resale is also a global phenomenon. The $177 billion in 2022 sales was a 28% increase from $138 billion over 2021, and the global market is estimated to reach $350 billion by 2027.

Although resale was widely adopted in 2022 and online resale climbed at a faster rate, macroeconomic factors, such as inflation and the cooling of the broader retail market from its 2021 highs, have tempered the growth trajectory for resale over the next five years, according to ThredUp.

• Last year’s report predicted the US secondhand market would reach $82 billion by 2026, as opposed to this year’s report, which estimates the market will total $66 billion by that time.

“2022 wasn’t a banner year for anybody selling anything. Maybe it was for premium and luxury—really post-Covid categories—but for apparel, 2022, as a discretionary category, was a tough year,” Anthony Marino, president at ThredUp, told Retail Brew.

Digital dash: Where resale has shone in particular is online. ThredUp predicts the online market alone will reach $38 billion by 2027, growing twice as fast as the rest of the secondhand market.

• Online resale is expected to grow 21% on average each year over the next five years.
• And Zoomers are driving that growth: 58% of Gen Z who bought secondhand in the last year made at least one purchase online, more than any other cohort.

Zoom out: With resale adoption seeming to hit a fever pitch, Marino mentioned that there are some holdouts, particularly in the luxury space, that are concerned with brand identity and counterfeiting on secondhand marketplaces.

“We want to make sure that the DNA of that brand translates faithfully into the retail experience,” Marino said. “If you’re a luxury brand, you’re more particular about things than a different kind of brand and you should be.”