Savvy clothing shoppers not only look for quality and price, but also resale value. •
Americans put stock in resale value of clothes, accessories
NEW YORK — Jenna Broems shops for clothes the way she hunts for a new car: She thinks of the resale value.
Broems, who lives in Stamford, Conn., buys only noted brands such as Abercrombie & Fitch and 7 for All Mankind because she figures they’ll fetch the highest prices when she lets them go.
“I’m now walking in like ‘ What’s the return of this? Am I going to be able to resell?’” said the 38-yearold teacher, who has reaped $2,500 from the clothes she has resold on ThredUP, an online resale site.
Increasingly, Americans are considering the resale value when they seek everything from jeans to handbags — a habit due in
part to a growing number of websites that facilitate the process of buying and selling pre-owned goods.
The sites represent a newer reflection of the tough economy: Consignment shops grew busier during the recession, when many Americans needed extra cash.
The habit has stuck during the economic recovery as people have enjoyed wearing the latest fashions without paying top dollar.
The trend is also a consequence of the escalating cost of luxury. Rising prices of designer merchandise in recent years have tested the willingness of even affluent shoppers to pay full price.
The price tag of a classic Chanel handbag, for example, is $4,900 this year, up from $2,250 in 2007.
The size of the resale market is tiny: About 10 percent of luxury goods — including clothing, handbags, accessories and home furnishings — are sold in the aftermarket, with about 1 percent of pre-worn goods sold online, according to Forrester Research.
But data also suggest that the area of retail is growing fast: Shoppers seem to have resale values in mind.
According to a survey conducted last year by the Cassandra Report of the market-research company the Intelligence Group, 44 percent of 900 shoppers ages 14 to 34 think of resale values when they purchase items such as electronics, furniture and clothing.
Shannon Dolan, who lives in San Francisco, would buy a Louis Vuitton handbag over a Gucci based on how much she thinks it will command if she resells it.
“It absolutely changed the way I shop,” said Dolan, who has made $10,000 on the online luxury resale marketplace the RealReal by selling clothes.
“I’m really thinking of the value and investment of some of the things I’m buying.”
Resale sites have taken note.
The sites marry the discounts found on online resale king eBay with tighter controls. Luxury sites such as Portero and the RealReal — the largest seller of authenticated luxury resale goods, with business expected to reach $100 million this year — have employees who ensure that the designer goods are authentic.
The sites also offer a faster way to sell than consignment stores, where shoppers can wait for months to have items sold and reap no more than 50 percent of the resale price. On the websites, items often sell within days, and shoppers receive as much as 80 percent of the resale value.
Many of the sites also have their own resale guides.
ThredUP loosely calls its guide a version of the official Kelley Blue Book, referring to the online manual that offers resale values for cars.
“This is a broad narrative on how people are buying things and using things,” said James Reinhart, co-founder and CEO of ThredUP, which was launched as an online children’s swapping business in 2009 and morphed into a resale site two years ago.
The RealReal, which in the summer plans to introduce a mobile application with a resale guide for consumers, said its resale calculations are based on the prices of the 450,000 items that it has sold since its founding in 2011.
Julie Wainwright — CEO of the RealReal, which focuses on the top-tier designer labels in fashion, accessories and jewelry — said her office fields five or six calls a day from customers wanting to know about the resale value of a brand.
“People will call us before they shop or while they’re shopping,” Wainwright said.
The labels with the most value in pre-worn clothing and handbags are Chanel, Hermes and Louis Vuitton; in shoes, it’s Christian Louboutin, she said.
Some shoppers say the sites make them more comfortable about spending money in traditional stores.
Amy Fine Collins, a special correspondent for Vanity Fair magazine, sold a Chanel handbag on TheRealReal.com for about $1,000 — a few hundred dollars more than she originally paid for it at the store. She had the handbag for about a year.
“I don’t have to get a nosebleed at the prices the way I used to,” she said.
“I know there’s a strong secondary market.”