Why fashion brands are using pre-loved clothing as a competitive advantage
Consumers love pre-loved clothing.
Buying second hand fashion has become a common behaviour with 52% of consumers reportedly shopping second hand apparel in 2023. According to ThredUp’s annual Resale Report (in partnership with GlobalData), 10% of the global apparel market is expected to be made up of second hand fashion by 2025. The global second hand apparel market also grew 18% in 2023.
Historically, pre-loved clothing was the wares of charity shops, vintage stores and jumble sales. Finding a specific item was like looking for a needle in a haystack with trawling the racks in-store the only option.
The rise of e-commerce marketplaces like eBay widened the market for pre-loved clothing, including making it easier to search for certain items or categories of clothing. More recently, second-hand clothing platforms have exploded with the likes of Vinted, Depop, Poshmark, and Vestiaire Collective.
In fact, eBay’s 2024 Recommerce Report found that 86% of shoppers surveyed have bought or sold a pre-loved item in the last 12 months. Now it seems that more and more retailers are adding pre-loved clothes to their own physical stores, moving second hand fashion from dedicated spaces to being part of the normal retail mix.
What’s interesting is that many of the more prominent brands that are currently exploring pre-loved clothing in their stores are fast fashion businesses. Given that their business models are based on producing lots of new styles quickly and responding to trends, making space for older, second hand items is a significant shift.
Caption: Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash
Big Name Pre-Loved Concepts
H&M recently launched its H&M Pre-Loved concept in France and Belgium. This follows a pilot in Barcelona last year and similar rollouts in the UK and US. Limited to a single store in each city currently – as well as online through Sellpy – H&M Pre-Loved features a curated range of pre-owned clothing. The items on offer change weekly and span the range of H&M Group brands alongside other external brands.
Last month, fast fashion giant Primark launched its first in-store swap shops. In partnership with Verte, the circular clothes swapping company, the first of the ‘Swap Shops’ was timed around London Fashion Week. This was followed by similar pop-ups in Manchester and Birmingham.
During the events, customers could bring up to five unwanted clothing items and accessories to the participating Primark stores and swap them for digital tokens in Verte’s app. These tokens could then be exchanged for other items. Any leftover clothes were kept for another swap event, donated to a local charity or added to the clothing drop-off points Primark has in its stores. Notably, customers didn’t have to bring in pre-loved Primark items, with all types of brands accepted.
The Verte Swap Shops weren’t Primark’s first pre-loved initiative. Since 2022, the retailer has operated Wornwell vintage clothing shop-in-shops in select locations. But the circular aspect is new for the brand. And it seems to be a calculated move.