H&M starts resales in U.S. with Thredup

Fast-fashion retailer H&M launched a resale program Tuesday in collaboration with Thredup, an online consignment platform that has partnered with dozens of brands to run their used clothing sales, H&M told Reuters.

H&M will be the largest retailer to work with Thredup, and the partnership will mark the retailer’s first resale marketplace in the United States, according to Abigail Kammerzell, head of sustainability for H&M North America.

“We’ve been working in secondhand since about 2015, really testing and learning,” she said. “And what we know is we need to make it easier to adopt.

We need to make it user-friendly and we need to make it easy to access.”

Roughly 30,000 articles of clothing will initially be available on H&M’S resale site. Thredup is responsible for powering the site and restocking it with H&M pieces sent in by users.

Other clothing retailers, including Inditex’s Zara and online fashion retailer SHEIN, have also launched resale marketplaces as shoppers express growing interest in sustainability initiatives. Brokerage Morningstar has estimated that the resale market could grow to $300 billion by 2031.

H&M has previously been criticized for marketing its clothing as more eco-friendly than it actually is, with a 2022 lawsuit accused H&M of ‘greenwashing’ for displaying sustainability scores that falsified information on how the clothing was manufactured.