Nobody Wants Your (Cheap) Stuff

Why circularity depends on us all buying better

This is Part 3 of a three-part series on the secondhand clothing market as I see it today, why it’s broken, and what we need to do to fix it.

Part 1 laid out why major resale players like Depop and Mercari have been eliminating seller’s fees. The short version? Resale today is fundamentally supply-constrained because selling secondhand is still just too hard.

Part 2 was a detour into Poshmark’s recent flip-flop on seller’s fees.

You should probably go read those first. But hey! I’m not the boss of you.

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I’ve taken you along the scenic route to get here, but let’s start by recapping the big ideas behind why resale is broken today:

Shopping secondhand has become more accessible and much more popular. This is a good thing! According to ThredUp’s 2024 Resale Report, 52% of all U.S. consumers shopped secondhand last year.

But, selling secondhand is still quite hard. It’s a pain in the butt to list items yourself. Selling on managed platforms like ThredUp or The RealReal is easier, but you end up paying what feels like quite a lot for someone else to do the work of listing for you. That same ThredUp Report showed that only 25% of us sold clothes secondhand last year.

This means that resale today is supply-constrained. There’s not enough stuff being sold secondhand to fulfill the demand of all the people who want to shop secondhand.

As another point of proof: this is why professional resellers exist! Love them or hate them, resellers are abitraging between those desperate for a “Preppy Normcore Y2K Abercrombie & Fitch Graphic Tee” and 38-year olds whose moms have been nagging them to clean out their teenage bedroom for the last 20 years. If it was easy for those 38-year olds to sell that stuff to the people who clearly want it, they would. But instead, it’s dumped at Goodwill.

So to “fix” resale, we’ve got to make it easier for everyday people to sell secondhand. IMO, the biggest unlock to making the process of resale easier is cracking the listing process.

And, how do we make it easier to list? No, it isn’t some fancy-pants AI.

Rather than asking you to create a listing from scratch at the very moment you are least excited about the item (when you want to sell), what if we just made it easy to hold onto the digital records that brands are already creating to sell stuff to you? It’s called a product listing page, and every brand and retailer that sells fashion via e-commerce spends a lot of time and money creating them.

What if we normalized grabbing that “listing” and making great use of it the entire time you owned an item? And then when you go to sell, creating the resale listing is no big thing. That’s the vision I’m building towards over at Indyx.

But, there is another BIG problem!!! There’s something else that we’ve got to tackle when it comes to squaring the circle between “we’ve got enough clothes for the next six generations” and “the vintage Celine hobo I want always sells out on The RealReal before I can get to it”.

The hard truth is that not all supply is good, viable resale supply.

I’m not making a value judgment here about what’s cool or uncool. It is just a fact that there is an economic floor to what items can even exist in the secondhand market.

Imagine you want to resell a top from your closet. Let’s think about the costs of doing that, starting with shipping.

On Depop, this ranges from $4.93 to $13.49. On Poshmark, it’s $7.97. Let’s call it $7.50.

This means any buyer out there needs to be willing to pay $7.50 at the absolute least just to get your top from your doorstep to theirs.

Add on that 10% buyer’s fee (excuse me, “buyer protection fee”) that supports the platform making this transaction possible, and the minimum possible price for a secondhand top is up to $8.25.

Now, imagine for a moment that this top you’re trying to sell is from Shein. $8.25 is already well above the average top being sold new on Shein.

Do you see the problem here?

Nobody is paying more for secondhand Shein when you can buy it brand new for less. It just isn’t economically possible for tops valued this low to be resold.

Even if your top isn’t from Shein, remember that this hypothetical $8.25 top is assuming that you will go through all the effort of reselling for the reward of…[checks notes]….zero dollars. Nobody will spend their precious free time listing items, managing sales, and driving back and forth to the post office for nothing.

How much is that time worth to you?

I’d personally need at least $5 per item for the trouble. Realistically, it’s more like $10+. And just like that, we’re pushing a sales price of $20+ to make it minimally worthwhile for sellers to sell.

In other words: any item must hold $20+ of value to have a real chance at circularity.

Note: this example is specific to selling online, but selling secondhand IRL has different costs like rent for the store and labor for employees that result in the same overall effect.

And yes, the same idea applies to donations, too. Goodwill may get its inventory for free, but all the *work* to sort through and sell that stuff isn’t free. Circularity has real costs, and those costs must be supported in the value of the items being circulated!

ThredUP and Poshmark know this, too

I’d set that minimum viability point at about $20, but the economics of circularity get increasingly viable at higher price points.

Why? It costs the same amount to ship and takes just as much of your time to list a $20 shirt as it does a $2,000 handbag. Okay, maybe you need to add in the cost of a third-party authenticator for the $2,000 bag. But even still, I promise you’ll be much more richly rewarded for reselling the bag than the shirt, all for about the same effort invested.

This is why secondhand consignment for high-end handbags, watches, and jewelry has always existed. Or at least, a lot longer than newer entrants like ThredUp or Poshmark attempting to make a business of peddling your used jeans.

It’s also why all the online resale platforms like ThredUp and Poshmark keep instituting new policies meant to further incentivize higher priced items and disincentivize lower priced ones.

The entire system of resale just works better and more reliably for items of value.

Our collective circularity delusion

We all LOVE to believe that there are people out there who want our stuff. That our closet is full of “perfectly good!” items that would be lovingly worn if only they reached the right person.

But as we just discussed, there is an unmovable economic floor to make the “reaching the right person” bit possible. No matter how unworn or lightly used, on-trend, or otherwise appealing your stuff is, it is destined for the trash if it doesn’t hold enough value to reliably support the costs of circularity.

And with how we are trending with fast fashion today, we are spiraling towards a world where our closets are stuffed to the brim with clothes that aren’t worth all that much to anyone.

In this world, circularity becomes impossible. And, we must realize this, because the spiral only accelerates if we begin to use the delusion of circularity as a salve to our overconsumption.

“I’ll buy this [$50] dress just in case. If I don’t wear it on my vacation, I’ll just resell/donate it! I’m sure someone else will want it”.

They don’t. And, that’s the problem.

What we can do about it

It’s simple, but not easy: we’ve got to start valuing our clothing more. Most of the time, that means buying less and paying more.

I know that can feel like a hard pill to swallow. In this economy?!?

But if you are able, choosing to pay more for fewer things does a few really important things.

First, it tends to keep those things in your own closet for longer, which is always the #1 most sustainable option.

• A higher price tag (typically) makes you think harder about the purchase, better evaluating whether it’s really the right choice for you.

• A higher price tag (typically) catapults you into a new tier of quality/design/brand name that you feel proud to own and excited to wear.

• A higher price tag (typically) forces you to buy fewer items overall, giving more literal time and space for each piece to actually be worn.

Or at least I know these things are true for me, as they’re basically the basis of my “12 new things a year” pledge I’ve held myself to for the past three years.

But beyond the impact on your closet, fewer items that each hold higher value makes them infinitely more likely to continue to circulate in the secondhand market.

And, all the above (^) is true at every price point. It’s true whether you’re currently a Zara shopper making a jump into COS. Or a COS shopper making a jump into Tibi. Or a Tibi shopper making a jump into The Row. This isn’t about shaming people of a certain income bracket about shopping from certain “bad” brands. It’s a mindset shift that we should all embrace about where and how we place value on our things.

We’ve got to stop buying borderline disposable clothing thinking that it’ll certainly live a happily-ever-after second life.

Because if it feels disposable to you, it’s disposable to everyone else, too.

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I recently spoke with

Emily Stochl

about a lot of the same ideas shared here. If you liked this, you’ll probably like that, too.

It's Still Too Hard to Resell Clothes

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