Can brands turn secondhand goods into a service? Ganni and Calvin Klein are trying

Fashion really costs too much and second-hand, on the other hand, costs little. In short, anyone who isn't a millionaire on this side of the world, today, buys only and exclusively vintage and second-hand. The phenomenon now involves everyone: even on Vogue Business the interviewees openly declare buying like crazy on Vinted, just like many influencers do. Inserting oneself into this cultural dynamic is essentially the only strategy to avoid being swept away. And right in these days, two brands have decided to turn second-hand into a service to offer to their customers: Ganni and Calvin Klein.

The projects of Ganni and Calvin Klein

On one side, Ganni, the Danish brand synonymous with cool and accessible Scandinavian aesthetics, has formed an alliance with Vestiaire Collective, to introduce a dedicated trade-in service. Customers can send their pre-loved items directly to the platform, where they are authenticated and, once approved, converted into a gift card for the value of the piece plus a 10% bonus, with the option of home pickup in the United Kingdom and the European Union. This approach not only rewards the user with immediate credit, eliminating the wait for a sale, but strengthens the bond with the community of the "Ganni Girls", already accustomed to swapping on Instagram, transforming second-hand into a natural extension of the brand's lifestyle.

In parallel, Calvin Klein presented Re-Calvin yesterday, a free take-back program in the United States, developed in collaboration with Trove, a marketplace, and Debrand, which handles circular logistics. Here, consumers visit a portal on the brand's website to print a free shipping label and send any clothing item, footwear, or accessory, including intimate garments like bras, swimsuits, and underwear, a category often excluded from circular circuits. Once processed, the pieces follow a tripartite flow: reuse through donations or second-hand partners for items in good condition; recycling or downcycling into new yarns or materials like insulators for those not reusable; and, as a last resort, conversion into energy from waste. A follow-up email then tells each user what happened to their package.

These initiatives, from two brands so distant in origin, size, and turnover, are different in spirit and operational terms (Ganni uses credit to stimulate the exchange of other Ganni products, Calvin Klein focuses on take-back) but share a common goal: making circularity a service that exists seamlessly with the rest of the brand's ecosystem, integrated into the digital touchpoints of websites and retail, and going beyond mere recovery to become a stimulus for post-purchase engagement. And this point is important given that in uncertain times like ours, the new principle of marketing is not just to make customers spend, but to make them loyal.

A predictable novelty?

If today we are talking about second-hand it's because, as mentioned, fashion costs too much. The situation is even worse in America, perhaps the most important market for luxury, where the now infamous Trump tariffs have made every single button more expensive, making the price discourse even more thorny than usual. Similarly, 15% tariffs on imports from the European Union are hitting luxury brands, already grappling with the sales crisis. Considering that raised prices have arrived at a time of extremely high media exposure for fashion, which has generated an unquenchable desire for 90% of the market, it's understandable why resale has become as important as it has. 

The numbers confirm it clearly. According to estimates from the Boston Consulting Group, the global resale market will reach 360 billion dollars by 2030, growing at a rate three times that of traditional retail – a trend that, as we said last year, sees 74% of brands without resale programs intending to implement them in the coming months. Last September, Maximilian Bittner of Vestiaire Collective told WWD that order volumes from June to August 2025 did not record the typical seasonal drop, and vintage listings have exploded by 220% in the last five years, while searches for historical items have quintupled. 

ThredUp, a leader in US resale, has balance sheets that demonstrate the dazzling health of resale: in the first quarter of 2025, revenues grew by 10% to 71.3 million dollars, with a +6% in active buyers (about 1.37 million) and a 95% surge in new buyers, the highest in company history. Losses were reduced to 5.2 million, and CEO James Reinhart attributes part of this acceleration to the closure of tariff exemptions for small packages, which penalizes giants like Shein without affecting true vintage. The same happens in Europe, but the surprising part is that in the same WWD article, UBS analyst Jay Sole estimated that there could be up to 200 billion dollars of potential "merchandise" in American wardrobes. A shockingly vast turnover.

But can it really be done?

Integrating resale and circularity as a service is not just a response to declining sales, but an opportunity to redesign fashion's business model. Among the advantages, there is certainly, as mentioned, strengthening brand loyalty: programs like Ganni's literally monetize engagement, converting discarded items into a kind of currency. A community-driven approach that, beyond extending the product lifecycle, educates consumers on responsibility. On the economic side, many have already jumped in: last May, for example, ThredUp declared its intention to make its technology accessible to third parties (i.e., brands or retailers) for website management and logistics: companies can monetize unsold stock in warehouses and customer returns.

In Japan, recently, the government has realized this economic opportunity and has talked about new guidelines it intends to implement by next year to bring the second-hand market turnover from the current 50 trillion yen to 80 trillion in 2030. These initiatives, as can be seen, are more motivated by practical reasons than ideological ones: if it's true that sustainability is not a determining factor in increasing a brand's sales, it's even truer that the problem of unsold merchandise, how to offload it discreetly while also trying to capture new market segments. In reality, in some ways it's already like that: in 2024, Reuters reported that 50% of Burberry's profits and 30% of sales came from 56 outlets around the world. If all that unsold merchandise ended up on Vinted or other platforms, it could yield excellent figures.

However, these approaches carry risks. The first is "cannibalization", i.e., the danger that sales of used items "eat into" those of new products: if consumers prefer second-hand because it's cheaper, brands could lose profits. Another obstacle is operational scalability: organizing the collection of items from various brands, verifying their authenticity (essential for luxury, to avoid fakes), and sorting logistics requires solid technological tools. Without strong alliances with reliable partners, however, these programs collapse. There is also the risk of "fast second-hand", a sort of revisited fast-fashion: platforms that speed up the buying and selling cycle, with low-value items and a saturated offer, instead of focusing on quality and longevity, reproducing the same flaws of the traditional model. 

Finally, the shortage of supply: people's wardrobes are full, but many hesitate to let go of their clothes; brands must invent creative incentives, otherwise they risk stock shortages that block growth. In conclusion, resale and circularity are not passing fads, but real services that, if guided intelligently, can revitalize the entire fashion industry: from a potential threat to the economy to a reliable partner for a more resilient tomorrow, where the value of a garment does not end with the purchase, but continues to regenerate and keep the dialogue between brand and public alive.