Why Should Vegan Fashion Embrace Re-commerce?

^{Published on 01 November 2024; updated on 30 December 2024}

This September two of the biggest re-selling platforms – eBay and Vinted – hosted runway shows at New York and London fashion weeks. eBay’s ‘Endless Runway‘ shows in both cities were fashion’s first exclusively pre-loved shows to date, and Oxfam’s partnership with Vinted in London was enthusiastically cheered by some of the most-followed talents of the moment: Robert Sheehan, George Robinson, and Frankie Bridge. And while ‘see now, buy now’ is hardly a revolution AD 2024, to have every item on the runway up for immediate grabs is a tribute to a new culture of shopping, where pre-loved garments and accessories are treated with the highest emotional engagement that was previously reserved for new, expensive statement pieces.

This new culture of shopping pre-loved goes well beyond a trend for vintage – it is a reasonable and practical response to cost-of-living and environmental concerns. In its 2024 Resale Report, ThredUp estimated that by 2025, 10% of the global apparel market is expected to be made up of secondhand. The global secondhand apparel market is further projected to grow three times faster than the overall global apparel market, and reach $350 billion by 2028. According to Future Market Insights, that number will reach $652.3 billion by 2032. In 2024, Vinted has reported a remarkable $19 million profit in 2023, a stark contrast to its $21.8 million loss in 2022. Meanwhile, the pre-loved initiative Charity Super.Mkt, supported by Shelter, Cancer Research UK (CRUK), and Oxfam, has reached an impressive milestone, generating £3 million in sales since its launch in January 2023.

Fashion brands of all categories are looking for a way to secure a decent share of this growing market. Established commerce platforms, both luxury (Vestiaire Collective, The RealReal, Fashionphile) and popular ones (eBay, Vinted, ThredUp) are upping their games with fashion shows and buzzy collaborations, while luxury (Burberry, Gucci, Alexander McQueen, Coach) and fast fashion brands (Zara, Boohoo, H&M) are actually developing their own re-commerce departments to own and embrace their own secondhand traffic.

What’s in it for the luxury sector?

For luxury brands, embracing re-commerce also means taking control over the counterfeit problem (at least the fake items circulating in the secondhand market). According to OECD, the global counterfeit operation is worth nearly half a trillion dollars a year, and is hitting American, Italian, and French brands the hardest in terms of revenue and credibility. The infamous case of Stella McCartney’s Karama counterfeit bags is proof that there is still much to do in tackling counterfeit and sustainability issues. For a luxury brand to have fakes circulating is bad enough, but for McCartney, who spent years pioneering – and taking the heat for – the use of non-leather materials (before veganism became trendy), having knockoffs made with real animal leather that circulate for a fraction of the original price is just irony at its worst.

The tricky business of counterfeit infiltration to the resale market has created a significant demand for authentication services. Unfortunately, it is not enough. Good quality knockoffs can be difficult to spot, and the level of expertise of those who offer authentication services vary, at best. And while those who follow a luxury brand for defined purposes will quickly see a creepy fake for what it really is, a big number of customers don’t actually mind wearing or carrying a knockoff, as long as it looks close enough.

A luxury brand’s own re-commerce platform would protect both the brand’s, as well as the customer’s interests, and might burst the bubble of high quality counterfeits in the long term. Digital Product Passports (DPP) and Digital IDs, though generally referred to as solutions to facilitate sustainability and circularity claims, might prove to be just the solution to the counterfeit problem as well. An item with either DPP, or Digital ID, can be quickly identified and verified by any user at any moment of a product’s life cycle. Every time a product lands at the doors of a resale channel, a quick scan is enough to prove its authenticity. EON’s Digital ID is already in use by major fashion brands and retailers, such as Chloé, Coach, Mulberry and YOOX NET-A-PORTER. Coach, in partnership with Poshmark, has implemented the use of Digital ID in their resale platform, which reduces the authentication and item description process down to a single click. For a vegan fashion brand, using DDP and/or Digital IDs can boost a brand’s credibility and visibility as it enters a trackable system of the most sought-after items on the global market. It will also prevent such ridiculous situations where a knockoff of a vegan item is circulated in inferior quality, or worse, in animal-derived products.

The Greener Green

Wearing a secondhand item is much better for the planet than giving one up for recycling. For vegan and sustainable fashion brands (Girlfriend Collective, Tentree, Patagonia), running a resale channel is proving to be the most tangible way to deliver on sustainability promises. Offering a resale channel, or at least some assistance in the matter, gives a brand with no-harm and eco-friendly claims much more credibility than flashing recycling tags around.

As it turns out, recycling clothes isn’t as simple as the mainstream fashion industry wants everybody to think. According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, only 1% of used clothing is actually being remade into new garments. For a fabric to be recycled and potentially reused, enormous amount of chemicals need to be used to break it down to single strands of fiber. Recyclable fiber such as cotton, wool, hemp, and polyester still need to be woven with a fresh input of raw fiber to make new fabric. Poor quality fiber are woven with synthetics to enhance their durability, and re-enter the market as blends. Blends are virtually impossible to break down. Therefore most athletic clothing, shape wear, and skinny jeans that have been thrown away specifically for recycling purposes end up going in the bin, and not recycled at all. A plastic bottle, if recycled to another bottle, can be further recycled for as long as it holds. Clothing, however, can only be recycled to fiber once, and once it is, it becomes just another set of dreadful blends.

Recycling is no response to environmental issues, just as buying items with fancy tags is no way of living a more sustainable life. The sustainable objective is to keep clothing and accessories circulating for as long as it is possible. By giving pre-loved items a chance to re-enter the market, a brand is reducing potential waste: for each resale item, there is one spot less occupied in a local landfill. Additionally, having full insight into resale data will help a brand adjust its production plan for less stock waste. For a brand to have a tangible impact, the re-commerce model should be developed and operated in alignment with the production model, eventually resulting in a reduction of the total number of new products and raising a brand’s revenue from selling the used products. For vegan brands, this is where re-commerce operational objectives align with no-harm and environmental stewardship values.

The way forward

A report co-authored by Trove and Worldly in 2023 estimated that resale can result in a 15-16% reduction in annual carbon emissions by 2040 in Premium Apparel and Outdoor brands. Brands that have full control of the resale operation and maximise revenue from secondhand items have the biggest potential to capture the greatest share of Scope 3 emissions benefit. And while this sounds particularly captivating for fast fashion brands, it is brands that focus on the durability, design and quality craftsmanship of their products that experience the most tangible benefits, as these are the qualities that prevail on the re-commerce market. 

As customers become more aware of what true sustainability stands for, it will become more challenging for brands to keep insisting on business models that value quantity over quality, and claims over verifiability. The implementation of the Greenwashing Directive in the European Union aims to put an end to an era of empty sustainability claims, even though the Directive does not tackle the waste problem directly.

In the UK, a collective force of QSA Partners, UKFT, British Fashion Council, the British Retail Consortium, and several luxury, fashion and retail brands is pressuring the government to implement Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) fees to impose a direct responsibility on producers to cover the cost of their products’ end-of-life treatment. Across the pond and a few states further, California’s SB707 bill, signed by Governor Gavin Newsom on September 30th, 2024, will make it a requirement for fashion brands to pay to have their clothing waste recycled. With stock waste actually costing brands money to deal with, it might dawn on some to look into more effective ways of spending their cash. Developing a re-commerce channel might prove be a smart start.