New marketplace urges shoppers to find the next owner before they buy

Imagine not even having bought the dress yet, but someone’s already asking to borrow it. While often, that’s your sister, now it could be a paying customer. Or at least that’s the idea behind Trace, a new online marketplace that lets shoppers line up an item’s next buyer or renter before they’ve even checked out at the store. The pitch? Knowing someone else wants that dress could make its price tag easier to justify.

The “presale” platform—which launched publicly on October 15 with a three-day pop-up at Shopify SoHo—grew out of Co-founder and CEO Katie Pfleger’s experience on both sides of the shopping equation.

Pfleger spent about five years as a software engineer at Etsy, working on its seller listing process, and also personally listed more than 700 items on Poshmark. Her co-founder and friend Ella Rubin, who she met at Harvard Business School, had a different approach to the problem: She justified new purchases by promising herself she’d resell them later without successfully following through.

But for Pfleger, the frustrations included the work of creating listings and the uncertainty afterward. “So even if you put in all the work, there’s no guarantee that you would sell something,” she told Retail Brew. “And even if you do sell something, it’s usually at a fraction of what you were hoping to get back.”

Dressed to resell: Trace’s answer was to move that uncertainty ahead of the original purchase. Shoppers essentially paste a product URL into the platform, which uses AI to generate a listing within seconds, while other users can place a “call”—proposing a price, a rental or resale arrangement, and a time frame, Pfleger explained.

Take a $300 dress, for example. Someone could offer to rent it for $100 for an upcoming wedding, allowing the shopper to arrange to recoup part of the purchase price before buying. That doesn’t change the retailer’s checkout price; it establishes a subsequent transaction.

After accepting a call, the shopper has 48 hours to purchase the item and upload a receipt. Otherwise, the call is canceled and the prospective renter or buyer receives a refund, Pfleger said.

According to Trace’s website, buyers pay a protection fee of 10% plus $3 and sellers pay no selling fee, while Trace takes 15% of rental income. The platform also facilitates prepaid shipping labels for sellers and offers buyer protection.

Although the platform technically calls itself “presale,” it is part of the expanding secondhand market, which per ThredUp’s 2026 resale report, grew nearly four times faster than the broader retail clothing market in 2025 in the US. The global secondhand apparel market is also projected to hit $393 billion by 2030.

Trace’s early testing, however, focused on willingness to list instead of just fully completed transactions. Pfleger said a March beta attracted ~350 organic users, excluding friends and family. And out of those who signed up, 32% immediately listed an item, while the average item price was approximately $667, with occasion wear emerging as the clearest “use case.”

Matching fits: Although these findings offer an early look at interest, it doesn’t necessarily prove that trend will turn listings into sales or rentals. So, naturally, getting enough people interested in the same product and size is the next challenge for the company.

It’s also why Trace is working with influencers, creators, and stylists whose recommendations can get shoppers’ attention for particular items. Its SoHo pop-up, for instance, featured products from eight stylists and creators, giving the company a chance to test the approach while explaining the service to would-be users in person.

At the moment, shoppers purchase independently from retailers and Trace has no retail partnerships, although Pfleger said a B2B offering is something the retailer has on its books. She also sees buy now, pay later services as somewhat of a competitor. “We really see ourselves as a financing tool, but doing it with other people’s demand instead of debt,” she said.

Whether that demand consistently materializes will be integral to Trace’s near future, which involves turning shoppers’ “I’ll resell it later” mindset into a transaction that happens in advance.