Trove Releases First of its Kind 2023 Brand Resale Index

The Brand Resale Index is the first benchmark specific for brands to measure the industry’s progress in the $100B global resale market

Outdoor brands are leaning into resale and emerging as leaders, but the big opportunity lies in luxury, as fabled goods are positioned to quickly dominate market share when luxury brands own their resale narrative

Trove, the market leader in branded resale and trade-in for world-class brands and retailers, today released its inaugural Brand Resale Index: Defining the Resale Experience. The Index is the first report of its kind, agnostic of resale platform provider, to evaluate leading practice adoption across 40 brands in four industry verticals: fashion/apparel, outdoor, footwear, and luxury. Conducted in partnership with OSF Digital, brands were assessed on 147 criteria across brand positioning, commerce, and trade-in experiences, with a general consideration of how the resale business model potentially contributes to environmental sustainability benefits.

The Brand Resale Index found that to brands, recommerce is what e-commerce was two decades ago: a retail model that satisfies the ever-increasing expectations for greater value, experience, and sustainability. In short, a major opportunity – and the invitation remains wide open for brands and retailers to exhibit leading commerce practices to elevate and engage new channels of growth. This opportunity is why global Resale is $100 billion today, growing 5X the rate of retail, and expected to represent 23% of all retail in 2030.

“We are currently at a major inflection point for branded resale, where early development is meeting commerce evolution. We created the Brand Resale Index to evaluate what brands are doing now, where the opportunities lie for the future, and what industries are positioned to really lean into the next big transformation,” said Andy Ruben, Founder and Executive Chairman of Trove. “Brands who scale their owned resale programs now will be building a profitable business without relying solely on new item production, ultimately helping to build the protective moat around their businesses by extending the life cycle of their products.”

Key Findings from Trove’s Brand Resale Index 2023:

The results are in: Out of 40+ brands across industries, several leaders emerged in the Resale Brand Leaderboard (by industry vertical):

• Overall: REI – 72%
• Outdoor: Arc'teryx – 68%
• Fashion/Apparel: Amour Vert – 66%
• Footwear: On – 59%
• Luxury: Phillip Lim – 53%

Luxury brands have a wide open landscape of opportunities as fabled luxury goods are the backbone of every luxury brand, yet secondary markets are attempting to tell their product stories. In contrast, the Outdoor brands emerged as the most mature in the index, whereas Fashion/Apparel and Footwear have grown the most over the past year.

Resale Storytelling: When brands own their narrative in resale, everyone wins. Branding a resale program is a powerful tool for creating a cohesive story that wins over audiences and optimizes the resale journey.

• Patagonia was the top in brand positioning of resale, adopting 78% of Marketing & Brand Positioning leading practices.
• On the brand’s website, 50% of brands include content about resale programs, but only 34% include content about their resale program on their homepage.
• Only 35% of brands promote their resale program through social media platforms.

Presentation and ease of use matters: The ways that brands present secondhand items to their customers and integrate this experience with existing commerce channels will ultimately determine friction within the purchasing journey.

• Coach was a leader in the commerce category, implementing 76% of commerce leading practices.
• Few brands fully integrate new and pre-owned into one shopping experience, with only 25% of brands allowing customers to combine purchases of new and pre-owned in the same cart.
• Just 49% of brands allow shoppers to filter by product condition (the quality of the item’s condition, i.e. like new or used) on the category page, despite the product pages including the item’s condition.
• Especially relevant and important for luxury and higher priced items, 57% include brand and product authentication of trade-in or consignment products.

Closets as Commerce: Brands that offer seamless trade-in experiences help unlock the $2.1 trillion of idle branded items in customers’ closets, while building brand loyalty.

The Frye Company’s “The Frye Exchange” was the leader in the Customer Experience: Trade-in/Selling (Digital), with an adoption of 85% of leading practices.

• lululemon’s Like New program was the leader in Brand Trade-in/Selling (Stores) for their trade-in program on brick-and-mortar store interactions, a capability adopted by 44% of all brands benchmarked.
• 85% of brands offer trade-in by mail, enabling customers to trade in their products regardless of where they live.
• 93% of brands offer gift cards for trade-in or sales compensation.

Achieving a Circular Model: While all 40 brands in the Index touted sustainability as a customer benefit, not all resale programs are good sustainability programs.

• The clearest way to know if a brand resale program is truly circular is if the program has the potential to shift from new product revenue (revenue from selling new items) to existing product revenue (revenue from selling or servicing existing items over a longer product life).
• Brand resale programs based primarily on new product purchase incentives are a risk for brands who want to tout sustainable claims.

To see the full 2023 Brand Resale Index, please visit: https://trove.com/brand-resale-index

For report imagery, download here.

About Trove

Trove is the market leader in branded resale and trade-in for world-class brands and retailers such as Canada Goose, lululemon, Patagonia, REI, Levi’s, Arc’teryx, Allbirds, and more. Through its proprietary Recommerce Operating System, Trove is accelerating the shift toward more sustainable business models, foundational for circularity. Over the last decade, Trove has equipped leading brands with technology and operations to create and scale branded resale programs by enabling customer trade-in of items, single-SKU identification and condition grading, site build and maintenance, and customer data collection, analytics and reporting. A Certified B Corporation, Trove is pioneering a new era of retail essential to a more sustainable future. To learn more, visit Trove.com.

About OSF Digital

OSF Digital is a global commerce and digital transformation leader with expertise in connecting technology and strategy to drive business goals. With expert status in B2C and B2B commerce and several Salesforce awards for multi-cloud innovation, OSF Digital seamlessly guides enterprises through their entire digital transformation journey. With customers in various industries around the globe, OSF Digital provides personal attention and the highest level of connection with a local presence throughout North America, Latin America, APAC, and EMEA. For more information about OSF Digital, visit: osf.digital

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