Trove releases inaugural 2023 Brand Resale Index

Trove, a company that offers resale and trade-in services for fashion labels, has released its first Brand Resale Index, which analyzes resale adoption and trends for 40 brands across the categories of fashion/apparel, outdoor gear, footwear, and luxury.

The Index, created in collaboration with OSF Digital, evaluated companies according to 147 distinct factors, including brand positioning, commerce, and trade-in experiences. It also took into account how the resale business model potentially contributes to environmental sustainability benefits.

Among of the 40 brands, Trove discovered that outdoor brands are embracing resale and rising to the top. Nevertheless, the greatest opportunity is in luxury, as fabled items are ready to quickly take market share when luxury businesses embrace their resale narrative.

Outdoor retailer REI takes the overall top spot on the Resale Brand Leaderboard, displaying 72% of best practices in brand positioning, commerce, trade-in, and business model integration for its Re/Supply program, which was initially made available online in 2017. Re/Supply has been integrated into REI’s mainline messaging, promoting trade-in and resale as a key benefit of membership. In 2021, REI resold more than one million products.

Outdoor firms are the most established in the Index, but according to Trove, fashion/apparel and footwear have grown the fastest over the previous year, with footwear brands particularly notable for having overcome the open-box problem. With 23 businesses included in the Index, fashion/apparel has the largest representation of any category, yet Trove notes that these brands frequently fall short of industry standards.

With a score of 66%, Amour Vert’s “ReAmour” brand topped the fashion and apparel category. It offers a fully integrated shopping experience with a single-cart checkout and the chance to accrue loyalty points for both new and used purchases.

With 59% of the market share, Swiss performance brand On lead the footwear sector thanks to its effective and well-designed ‘Onward’ commerce platform, which combines size, color, and condition variants into a user-friendly and engaging digital experience.

For “celebrating the intrinsic value of their pre-owned pieces,” which they bring to life across the internet shopping and selling experience, Phillip Lim 3.1 Archive received the highest rating in the luxury sector—53 percent.

The pre-owned products market will reach a global value of $100 billion in 2022, rising at a rate of five times that of overall trade, making resale the fastest-growing sector of the retail industry. According to Ellen MacArthur, worldwide resale will quadruple to 250 billion US dollars by 2027 and account for 23% of retail sales. Thus businesses should consider launching their own resale and trade-in services to help usher in a new era of trade.

Andy Ruben, founder and executive chairman of Trove, said that they’re currently at a critical inflexion point for branded resale, when early development is meeting commerce evolution. To assess what brands are doing right now, where prospects for the future are located, and which industries they are in, they developed the Brand Resale Index.

Ruben added that brands that scale their owned resale programs today will be developing a lucrative company without relying only on new item creation, ultimately aiding in the construction of the protective moat around their enterprises by prolonging the life cycle of their items.

In the report, Trove adds that branding a resale program is a “strong tool for building a unified story that wins over audiences and optimizes the resale journey” and that when businesses own their narrative in resale, “everyone wins”.

To demonstrate how the program supports and integrates with the brand’s goal and values, 63 percent of the companies it analyzed produced specific resale branding, and 79 percent of brands featured links to the resale site in the mainline menu navigation as a sign of brand integration. However, only 35% of brands promoted their resale through social media platforms, and only 28% included pre-owned as a segment on the main website.

Because only 49% of brands allow customers to filter by product condition, such as the quality of the item’s condition, i.e., like new or used on the category page, despite the fact that the product pages include the item’s condition, the ways that brands present used items to their customers and integrate this experience with existing commerce channels “will ultimately determine friction within the purchasing journey”.

Just 25% of brands allow customers to combine purchases of new and pre-owned in the same cart, and very few brands fully integrate new and pre-owned into one shopping experience.