Sales drop, but offerings ample at resale shops
For the last four months, Laurie Sigelman, an accountant in her late 40s who lives in the Studio City neighborhood of Los Angeles, has been waiting impatiently for her favorite stores on Melrose Avenue to reopen.
It isn’t a fresh pair of Newbury boots from Rag & Bone or a summery sheath from Marc Jacobs that she’s been gunning for, but their timeworn, wallet-friendly counterparts lining the shelves at resale shops like Wasteland and Crossroads Trading Co.
“I’m allergic to paying retail prices,” Sigelman said over the phone while driving around to check in on her favorite secondhand spots, an almost daily ritual.
The heightened focus on hygiene and worries about contamination since the pandemic have not changed that, she said. “I’ve done my research, and I’m not at all reticent,” she said. “The virus doesn’t seem to sit on a piece of clothing for very long.”
Sigelman is one of a select group of shoppers whose loyalty to the secondhand market, with its good deals, ecological cred and emphasis on individual style, will not be swayed by the coronavirus.
Online resellers like Poshmark and Thredup have thrived during the pandemic, providing the stir-crazy and housebound with an easy closet cleanout option through the mail. But for some secondhand shoppers, nothing can compare to the hunt IRL. Michelle Plantan, a social media director living in the Venice section of Los Angeles who has bought a few items of vintage clothing on online platforms and Instagram over the past few months, said the experience just doesn’t compare
to the in-store search.
“There’s so much magic in just browsing and trying on pieces in real life,” Plantan, 31, said. “And when shopping secondhand or vintage, you really want to see the fabric and quality up close, which is harder to do online.”
Still, online resellers are well on their way to winning over any reluctant consumers, with the category expected to jump from $30 million in the United States this year to $70 million by 2027, according to research from Future Market Insights, a retail analytics firm. If that comes to pass, the online market will outpace traditional in-store thrift and resale, which is expected to drop from $57 million this year to $50 million by 2027.
The pandemic, which has decimated the sales of many small businesses, if
not closed them entirely, may well accelerate this shift.
“I’m worried about the viability of these businesses existing in big cities like New York and Los Angeles,” said Jessica Tran, founder of Ghost Vintage, which has sold predominantly at outdoor thrift markets in New York and, now, online. “It seems far-fetched that they’ll be able to keep paying rent with a possible second wave and people shopping less.”
Shopping for clothing of any kind has been scaled back over the last few months, with factors like unemployment and a recent rise in coronavirus cases slowing reopenings across the country. According to a July survey from Mintel, 33% of people have stopped buying clothes entirely, while 32% have
concerns about shopping for clothes in a store.
This bleak reality, however, has led some of the secondhand market’s most loyal shoppers to view continued in-store shopping as a moral imperative to keep the small businesses that underpin the market alive.
At resale chains like Buffalo Exchange, Crossroads Trading Co. and Wasteland, which are more corporate than one-off, hole-in-the-wall shops, in-store capacity has been reduced to about 50%, with fitting rooms closed and extended return policies implemented to make up for the inability to try things on.
Masks and social distancing are required, with many locations using signs and floor stickers to guide traffic in an effort to eliminate the usual jams. Items carried around the store but not purchased get quarantined in the back for 24 hours, a timeout that owners aren’t even sure is necessary. Many stores are discouraging or outright refusing cash payments to lessen contamination risk.
Some of these new guidelines seem moot: Many businesses report doing 50% or less of their pre-pandemic business on a good day.
Inventory, though, is high, with time-rich and money-strapped customers eager to clean out their closets for cash or credit.
Before the pandemic, lines to sell at many of these stores trickled out the door and around the block, often with an anticlimactic conclusion (most buyers are picky, with $30 considered a high payout). With selling now moved to appointment only at most of these stores, with a 40to-50-piece limit on the number of items sellers can bring in, friction on both sides of the exchange has been lessened.
“We’re finding that customers are actually bringing us a better selection of clothing to start with than they were before,” said Rebecca Block, vice president of Buffalo Exchange. The chains are now considering implementing this format permanently.
Clothing sold to these stores is placed on hold for 24 hours, in the hopes that any viral contamination lingering on the fabric will dissipate before it goes on sale. Shoes and sunglasses get sprayed with disinfectant where possible. It’s a tedious, uncertain process but one that store owners believe they can’t afford not to do.
Research on how the coronavirus interacts with different surfaces is still in its infancy and has been largely inconclusive, particularly when it comes to fabric, but most experts say that aerodynamics make it unlikely for a droplet of the virus to settle on clothing and that, if it does, it may not survive very long.
Still, of all the industries grappling with newfound shopper hesitations, the secondhand market may be most familiar with such stigmas: It’s a market that customers have historically either loved or found Windex-worthy. Even before the pandemic, 55% of shoppers worried about cleanliness when buying pre-owned items, according to Mintel, the market research firm.
“There’s long been a taboo around shopping secondhand; people see it as dirty and time-consuming,” said Tran of Ghost Vintage. “My own mother used to tell me I could get diseases from shopping vintage!”