Thrifting is back, though this time it has a tech spin on it.
An entirely new generation has discovered the pleasures of digging through other people’s discarded clothes in the hopes of finding the perfect piece. Hoping to cash in on the trend, companies have been embracing resale platforms, allowing them to capture some residual value while polishing their sustainability bona fides.
If it sounds too good to be true, it is for now, at least. Brand-owned resale still has a few kinks to work out if it’s going to transform retail.
Few companies have embraced resale as much as Patagonia, the outdoor gear supplier. Its Worn Wear program, which began as a used clothing section in its retail stores, is now a full e-commerce site that offers discounts on items with plenty of life in them. For brand aficionados, it also gives them access to back catalog items that are no longer available. It’s been a decade-long experiment that teases what a future circular economy might look like.
For companies like Patagonia, brand-owned resale is appealing for several reasons. The privately held company’s clothing has a reputation for being “buy it for life,” and its items tend to last for years, even decades. Plus, for a company that has staked its name on sustainability, selling used clothing is a logical extension of the brand.
For other companies, even if sustainability isn’t a key differentiator, brand-owned resale sites can help capture some of the value that would otherwise go to secondhand markets like eBay, Poshmark, Mercari and others.
To fill Worn Wear’s virtual shelves, Patagonia pays people for their old clothing. Not as much as they might get if they were to sell them directly on other resale sites, but it promises to be a simpler process: either drop off the clothes at a Patagonia retail store or mail them in. The company’s partner, Trove, handles the rest.
Once an item arrives at Trove’s warehouse in California, a team of workers inspects and photographs it. It also compares the item ID against a database it maintains to determine whether the piece is authentic. Items that can’t be identified (maybe the item ID is unreadable), the company employs computer vision to narrow the possibilities. The workers log descriptions of each item’s condition so that once they appear on the resale site, which Trove also manages, customers have a decent idea of what they’re buying. Since each item that winds its way through Trove’s warehouse has different wear patterns, they all receive unique SKUs. Partners can monitor their resale platform’s performance through dashboards, reports and CRM integrations.
Trove has ridden the resale wave, raising over $150 million total, including an early-stage investment from Tin Shed Ventures, Patagonia’s venture capital fund. It’s not the only resale platform that works directly with brands, but it’s broadly considered a leader. Recently, though, Trove appears to have stumbled. Its Series E round, which closed in July, added another $30 million to its coffers but also cut its valuation in half, according to PitchBook. Still, the resale company has managed to attract a dozen clothing and outdoor gear companies to its platform, including not just Patagonia but also REI, Levi’s, Lululemon, Allbirds and others.
That would appear to be a vote of confidence in not just the concept, but also the way the company handles the resale process. But given my experience with Trove and that of others, the company has some work to do.
My first experience with Worn Wear a few years ago was positive. I took an old sweater to a Patagonia store and received a $30 gift card for my trouble, a $10 premium over the standard rate because the guy behind the counter was chuffed with the piece’s condition and its relative rarity. It was a great experience, and I was eager to try it again. Years later, I bought a down vest. It’s great.
But my most recent interaction with Worn Wear was less positive. What’s more, my experience doesn’t appear to be an isolated incident, suggesting that if brand-owned resale platforms are ever going to be more than a rounding error in a quarterly report, they’ll have to work hard to retain trust among their clientele.
Is that my stuff?
Last January, I received an email from Patagonia: The company would be doubling trade-in values for items mailed directly to Worn Wear that month. I’d been meaning to clean out the closet, so I gathered some old clothes and gear and mailed them in.
Big mistake.
Trove, which basically runs the entire Worn Wear operation, quoted me $380 for four jackets and two pants, assuming all the items were in sellable condition. No problem, I thought: My wife and I tend to be pretty easy on our clothing. Some items had some very modest wear and tear, but nothing beyond what I had already seen on the Worn Wear site. I dropped the items in the mail before the end of the month, and Trove sent me an email on February 2 that it had received my package.
On February 27, I received a gift card for $140.
Trove had accepted three items but claimed the other three were ineligible because they were either discolored or had holes. Now, I realize everyone thinks they’re above average, but I was genuinely stunned by this assessment. It was in line with the sorts of disclaimers I had often seen — and still see — describing items for sale on Worn Wear.
I went back to photos I had taken of the items just before sending them in, but I couldn’t see the problem. Trove said one women’s jacket had “discoloration in multiple locations” while another was ineligible “due to holes on hems.” The former was a workwear jacket made from hemp denim, and some discoloration is to be expected. The latter, a down jacket, did have small, pinpoint holes from wear along the cuff. The third item, a pair of jeans, was rejected because there were allegedly holes on the back. I didn’t recall any holes at all, and I had recently worn them. Trove said they had donated the rejected items, which the Worn Wear site had warned me about.
Trove frequently sells items that match those descriptions. Though the Worn Wear inventory turns over, it’s not hard to find similar examples on the site today: “Two minor pinholes on multiple locations. Two patches on multiple locations,” one description of a women’s down jacket reads: “Moderate discoloration on multiple locations,” reads the page for another women’s jacket. “Moderate fading on multiple locations. Minor unthreading on back,” says the description of a pair of men’s jeans.
Yet something even more surprising happened along the way. I suspect Trove sold my jeans anyway.
After I sent my items into Trove in late January, I started watching the Worn Wear site closely to see when they might appear. I was more curious than anything else. I thrifted a bunch when I was in high school, and I tend to donate things to Goodwill rather than throw them out. I wanted to see if I could observe the digital equivalent in action.
On February 23, I’m fairly confident I saw my jeans. The ones posted were the same year and the same size. The faded knees and whiskers on the thighs looked identical to the ones I had mailed in. They even had creases toward the bottom where I used to cuff them. I kind of got a bit of a thrill to be honest. Here was my old stuff, getting a second life! Then four days later, Trove told me they had rejected my jeans and wouldn’t be paying me for them.
Now, it’s entirely possible that someone else mailed the same style of jeans from the same spring 2017 collection in the same 31-inch waist with the same wear patterns during the same time window. Possible, but not very likely.
After I received the trade-in report from Trove, I wrote to customer service. Jenny replied and restated the issues with the two jackets, but not the jeans. “Normally I can ask our trade-in specialist to take a photo of the flaws. Due to the delay, the items have already been sent out for donation,” she told me without specifying where they were donated. She also included a $25 gift card, which was nice, but that didn’t get me anywhere close to the $380 I was initially quoted. A month later, Worn Wear sent me an email apologizing for the delay in processing my clothes and offering 20% off my next order on the site. (Despite the gift card and discount, I still haven’t bought anything from the site.)
Neither Trove nor Patagonia responded to multiple requests for comment.
“Classic Worn Wear”
Apparently I wasn’t the only one who had a problem with Trove around that time. A lengthy Reddit thread on the normally sleepy Patagonia subreddit popped up in January recounting that user’s dismal experience with the Worn Wear program. (I wish I had seen it before mailing in my items.)
The original poster had mailed four items to Trove: two jackets they said were in excellent or like new condition, an unworn down vest, and a Better Sweater jacket in good condition. They only received credit for the Better Sweater. Regarding the other items, Trove said they all had “Discoloration on inner hem.” The unworn vest had another comment: “Excessive wear in several places, small hole in right sleeve.” (Note: It’s a vest, which by definition doesn’t have sleeves.)
“Classic Worn Wear,” said one commenter. Another added, “I had the same experience. I sent in 12 items and only received credit for 5. Never again will consider Worn Wear again.” The original poster got lucky: They successfully asked for their items to be mailed back to them. Many others did not.
Other brand-owned resale sites appear to suffer from similar problems. REI Re/Supply, which is also run by Trove, told one person that their lightly used hiking backpack was unsellable because it had a broken waist belt, which the person claimed was not the case. (Trove later admitted the waist belt comment was an error but said the bag was too damaged to sell; the original owner said it was merely a bit dusty from the trail.) Another person said their lightly used hiking boots were denied because they were “missing insulation” even though they never came with it. “Honestly this [has] been my experience with every mail in gear/clothing service,” a third person said.
Brand-owned resale platforms work because of the trust these brands have built up over the years. Buy-side customers find them appealing because they carry the brand’s stamp of approval, and items often come with a warranty attached. Sell-side customers like the convenience and are often enticed to sell to them because the brand promotes the platform.
But when that trust is broken, what value do brand-owned resale platforms provide? If people can’t trust that their items will be fairly appraised, they’ll either take them to the store or write off the process entirely.
At that point, resale platforms lose their economies of scale and the parent brand loses the convenience of having a third-party handle the bulk of the trade-in process. Those are both key selling points when resale platforms make their pitch to retailers. What’s more, if people are driving to the store simply to trade in clothing, the resulting pollution likely negates used clothings’ carbon savings, which Trove itself estimates is only 15% or so at the high end.
Compounding the risk is that many people don’t know that brand-owned resale sites aren’t run by the brand themselves. Bad experiences with a trade-in reflect poorly on the brand, a sentiment many commenters have expressed. The number of people trading in may not be significant enough to severely harm the brand, but at the same time, consumers can be fickle about brands. It doesn’t take much to tip the balance.
Brand-owned resale still has a lot of promise, and while the potential for carbon reduction may not be enormous, it’s not insignificant. Customers on the buy-side are generally pleased with the results, enjoying discounts on like-new items and access to sought-after pieces that have gone out of stock. Still, if people on the sell-side increasingly sour on the experience, the virtual shelves will be empty and nobody will be happy.
Addendum
Four days after this story was published, I finally heard back from Trove (or rather, Rebecca Weisner, who works at Trove’s PR firm). She claimed the firm had no record of me asking for comment. I should note that my sent folder contains messages (which didn’t bounce) to Trove’s press email on March 20, October 31, and November 3.
Trove used its single-SKU-per-item system last week to track what happened to my jeans. Of the 914 pairs of that style that had ever been traded in, only nine were size 31 in dark denim, and apparently at least two were sent in around the same time. “This pair is not the jeans the author submitted in late January, which were subsequently responsibly recycled,” Weisner’s email said. Through Weisner, Patagonia said it sends rejected items to third-parties for recycling. “No product will be sent to the landfill,” the company said.
Trove also said that it had changed the trade-in process for Patagonia, adding checklists to “avoid ineligible items being traded digitally” and the option for people to have their items returned to them.
Update: This story was updated with the addendum on November 15, 2023.