Resale Market 2026: From Thrift To Retail’s Next Growth Engine

The array of products on offer in the resale market is growing every day. gettyA decade ago, resale still felt like a bargain hunt: scattered listings, inconsistent quality, and a lingering stigma. Today, the resale market—often called secondhand, vintage or recommerce—looks a lot more like modern retail. It has professionalized across pricing, authentication, fulfillment, brand partnerships and customer experience. As we head into 2026, the most important shift isn’t just that resale is growing. It’s that resale is becoming basic to retail. That evolution is visible in the numbers and in the mix of companies shaping the category. ThredUp’s latest Resale Report says the U.S. secondhand apparel market will grow 14% in 2025, and that online resale will grow even faster, by 18% —far faster than the broader clothing market. It also projects U.S. online resale to reach $40 billion by 2029. Growth matters, but the “how” matters more: the resale market is fragmenting into distinct business models, each solving a different retail problem—loyalty, customer acquisition, returns, overstock and inventory liquidity.The Resale Market’s New Operating System1) Curated marketplaces are chasing volume.The RealReal helped define the online resale model: a centralized marketplace with authentication, photography, pricing and fulfillment all in one place—built to make secondhand feel like what you’re used to at a luxury retailer. While the company’s performance has been improving, the profit it reported in the last twelve months came mostly from forgiveness of debt by its lenders and not from resale operations. It has raised over $1.3 billion. ThredUp is also a centralized model built for both luxury and everyday apparel. Founded in 2009, it has built one of the largest online resale marketplaces for women’s and kids’ clothing, processing well over 100 million secondhand items from tens of thousands of brands and now has “resale-as-a-service” where it white labels a resale function for brands. It has raised over $400 million and has never shown a profit (although recent results show narrowing losses). MORE FOR YOUOnline resale started with heavily funded marketplaces chasing huge audiences and category dominance. When those platforms struggled to generate attractive returns, it soured investor sentiment on resale’s potential. Now, a second generation of more focused operators is proving that, by zeroing in on specific pain points, it’s possible to build profitable—or near-profitable—businesses with a fraction of the capital.2) Specialist luxury resellers are building “trade-in” habits.Fashionphile’s long-running partnership with Neiman Marcus is one of the clearest examples of resale moving from side hustle to retail flywheel—turning last season’s bag into credit for a new purchase and keeping the customer inside a luxury ecosystem.MyGemma, focused on jewelry, watches and handbags, is another sign of category specialization. According to Bain & Co.’s Luxury Goods Worldwide Market Study, jewelry has become the most resilient luxury category. By concentrating on a limited set of categories, resellers can focus on the most desirable products for resale, use their expertise to avoid getting stuck with slow-moving inventory and invest more in customer service.Hardly Ever Worn It, a UK-based luxury resale platform, follows a similar specialist path with curated pre-owned designer fashion and accessories. It is expanding through partnerships, including a storefront on Amazon’s Luxury Stores in Europe and a new beauty resale offering. Its focused scope and partnership-led growth show how smaller specialty operators can carve out durable niches in resale.In 2026, expect more “category experts” to win share. Jewelry, watches and iconic handbags behave differently than apparel: they have clearer reference pricing, stronger authentication norms, no sizing issues and a growing cohort of customers who purchase with future resale value in mind.3) Brand-powered resale is moving from pilot to profit center.Probably the biggest obstacle to growth in resale is that brands have historically not supported it. The legacy view is that resale cannibalizes the purchase of new products. Especially for luxury products, the thinking was that it dilutes the market with lower-priced products and customers who can’t afford the brand.Those fears are beginning to fade. Belief is setting in that resale can be an acquisition tool (resale shoppers skew younger), a loyalty tool (for store credit), a pricing intelligence tool (what holds value and why) and a way to stake out a credible position on sustainability. The move now is branded resale where a brand runs or subcontracts the resale channel so it can control pricing, customer data, and a pathway to purchase new products.That’s where resale infrastructure subcontracting comes in. Trove and Archive both partner with brands in the background to launch and operate resale programs. Trove’s acquisition of Recurate underscores a possible consolidation trend in resale enablement. 4) Wholesale, discovery and “guaranteed buyback” are reshaping liquidity.LePrix shows the B2B side of resale: enabling authenticated luxury supply at wholesale scale and plugging into new selling formats like live shopping. It arbitrages vintage products in foreign markets and provides them to resale marketplaces in the U.S., overcoming the most vexing problem for resellers: having enough of the right inventory. Meanwhile, the discovery layer is improving fast. Beni, for example, positions itself as a secondhand search companion—checking many resale sites while shoppers browse retail. The implication of its browser extension is pivotal: when a shopper is looking for a product, the app will simultaneously surface comparable secondhand products. If it sticks, resale will become a more ingrained shopping behavior.Croissant is a different but telling model: “guaranteed resale” or buyback pricing at the moment of purchase, attempting to turn resale value into an explicit part of the primary sale decision. As it explains on its website, “Shop as usual, and when you’re ready to sell, we’ll buy your items back in one click via our app. It’s that simple.”What To Expect In 2026Resale will look less like a marketplace category and more like a retail feature.The big change in 2026 will be integration. More brands will embed trade-in and resale into owned channels, whether they do it on their own or with infrastructure provided by third parties in the background. Expect resale to show up inside loyalty programs, at point-of-sale, and in post-purchase flows (returns, upgrades, wardrobe refresh).AI will be applied to the “dirty work,” not the hype.Resale is operationally complex: item intake, condition grading, photography, pricing, fraud detection, and customer support. The winners are using AI to reduce cost per item and increase sell-through—automating listing creation, dynamic pricing, and personalization. Cutting the costs of resale where every item is one-of-a-kind is a key element of profitability. Digital IDs and product passports will push the industry toward verified provenance.Digital identity systems, hack-resistant identities for each garment, handbag or product, are already being used to make “instant resale” easier. The EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation will require uniform digital product passports and supporting infrastructure in place by 2027—making 2026 an important year to build. Eon is one of the clearest examples of digital product identity moving from concept to infrastructure. Its platform creates persistent digital IDs that travel with a product throughout its life, giving brands a way to authenticate items, track ownership, support buyback programs and automate resale. As brands prepare for Europe’s Digital Product Passport requirements, systems like Eon’s are becoming more important for compliance and infrastructure.Solaire’s system assigns each item a verifiable digital record—using blockchain to ensure provenance and tamper resistance—which can automate authentication, valuation and even resale listing. While still early, Solaire represents what brand-led resale could look like when product identity and lifecycle data are embedded from the moment of manufacture rather than bolted on later.Regulation and trade friction could become a tailwindAs low-value import rules tighten and cross-border ecommerce becomes more expensive, consumers looking for value will have more reason to buy secondhand—especially in categories where “new” prices have climbed sharply. Tariffs are one example of how policy can raise the effective cost of cheap imports, indirectly strengthening resale economics. The bottom lineThe resale market’s story going into 2026 isn’t simply “it’s growing.” It’s that resale is becoming a core capability of retail—powered by brand programs, specialized category leaders, better discovery tools and a new layer of authentication and digital identity. The companies that win will make secondhand feel as easy, trustworthy and integrated as buying new—while proving they can do it profitably.If 2025 was the year resale regained momentum, 2026 looks like the year resale becomes closer to standard operating procedure.