In the rapidly growing resale market, there’s a sort of boxers-or-briefs binary.
Some brands opt for a peer-to-peer model, like eBay, where resale sites bring sellers and buyers together, with sellers listing, photographing, and shipping the products.
Others opt for trade-in programs more like ThredUp, where sellers ship items to brands (or bring them to stores), and the brand warehouses, lists, and ships them, much like new inventory.
What brands haven’t done much is take an all-of-the-above approach, letting consumers choose. And that may seem inconsistent with the notion that, in another context, brands can’t seem to stop rhapsodizing about an omnichannel approach, where instead of dictating whether customers shop online or in-store, they—all together now—meet customers where they are.
But that’s beginning to change. Although brands tend to launch with either a trade-in or peer-to-peer model, after getting their sea legs they increasingly add the other option, too. Let’s call it “omniresale,” and see how it’s taking shape.
Two-way Treet: Treet, which partners on resale sites with about 150 brands, including Girlfriend Collective and Ministry of Supply, launched in 2021 with only the peer-to-peer option.
Jake Disraeli, co-founder and CEO of Treet, told Retail Brew that sellers of used items tend to fall into two camps, “convenience seekers” and “value seekers.” Convenience seekers tend to favor trade-in programs, which often don’t pay as much as selling peer to peer, but putting a bunch of items in a shipping bag or dropping them off at a store is far simpler than photographing them, listing them, and shipping them.
On the other hand, “value seekers may care more about getting more value from their items sold, and so they’re always going to opt in for peer to peer,” Disraeli said.
To help brands accommodate both camps, about a year ago, Treet began offering what it calls “stackable solutions,” on their website, meaning not only that it enables brands to choose a trade-in option in addition to (or instead of) of peer to peer, but also helps them expand their resale websites to sell their returns and excess inventory there, too.
While a year ago none of its brand partners offered both peer-to-peer and trade-in programs, today about 10% of them do, and Disraeli said Treet is just getting started.
“It’s going to be huge,” Disraeli said. “It’s a great growth area for our company to get more of our brands on both models.”
2 Live Cru: Rylee + Cru, an upscale children’s clothing brand where a parent might spend $98 on a corduroy bomber jacket for a toddler, is a Treet partner that launched its peer-to-peer resale e-commerce site in 2022.
“I was surprised by the feedback of essentially most of our customers knowing about the resale program, but probably only 10% saying they were even interested,” Sam Larson, web operations manager at Rylee + Cru, told Retail Brew.
“They were telling us directly…‘If we do want to resell, it’s too tedious,’” Larson said. “It’s like, ‘I’m a mom and I have three kids, and I don’t want to list 20 items that I have to print labels for and sell.’”
So Rylee + Cru added the trade-in option in 2023. Whichever consumers choose is a win for the brand because it’s “like a brand stamp that our garments last,” Larson said. “If you buy these things, they have value after, whether you choose to give it away, whether you choose to sell that to somebody else—whatever you choose to do, we’re enforcing the value proposition.”
All Trover the map: One sign that “omniresale” is not just a term we’re coining—but rather a concept with a future—came on August 13. That’s when Trove, the eight-year-old branded resale service with a trade-in focus with brand partners including Canada Goose, Carhartt, and Patagonia, announced it had acquired Recurate, a competitor with a peer-to-peer focus and brand partners including Steve Madden and Michael Kors.
“It’s always been a little bit of a gap for Trove that we don’t have peer to peer,” said Trove CEO Terry Boyle, explaining to Retail Brew that having both resale options in its toolbox could give retailers peace of mind that they’d be advised to get the best resale option for their shoppers, not just one that its would-be partner specialized in.
“It just makes it that much clearer for brands who they can turn to for advice and consultation on building the resale program that they want.”