Is resale cooked?

Big money is trying to burn it to a crisp!

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— Jonah & Erin

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A friend of mine is a vinyl head who checks in every now & then on the resale value of various grail LPs he owns, not because he wants to sell them but just because it’s fun to know what other people are paying. The market is broadly unpredictable, but he told me about one small-run record label whose releases he collects, which consistently sell out in a few days — after which if you try to find them, he noticed, they reliably go for ~3-4x the MSRP. “I’ve realized I could be buying an extra copy of every release, just to sell it and make a profit each time,” he said. “But I don’t want to relate to records that way.”

He would find it bleak, that is, to treat records he loves, kicks back to, and has invested with all kinds of intangible meaning, as though they were assets. He’s a collector, driven by enthusiasm, and while collectors definitely exhibit compulsive and fetishistic brain-worm behaviors, he doesn’t want to cross the line into speculator and flipper, “seeking alpha” and chasing “market arbitrage opportunities” or whatever. He wants to surround himself with beloved chunes!

I’m the same way. If I operated a resale business, that would be a different story — shout out to great vintage dealers. But since I am not one, the idea of relating to the things I ostensibly cop for pleasure as assets feels grim to me, too. I’ve been to fleas and spotted art, furniture & garments for sale below market value, but if I don’t love something, I can’t cop it. Because I want no part of what you could call the “Cursed Liquid Asset Portfolio” (C.L.A.P.) Mindset. I want to buy things out of love, because they call to me, because they are tight. Not because I see some “upside potential.”

These days there’s looming pressure for each & every one of us to regard ourselves as small businesses, compelled to turn all corners of our waking existence, including what used to be known as “hobbies,” into Economically Productive Behavior. This is wack, and the C.L.A.P. is one manifestation of it.

But is there a different, milder, less-cursed version of this mindset? A version where you cop something not expressly to flip it, like a sneaker reseller does, but reassured nonetheless that the thing is likely to hold its value, and that if you do ever need or want to sell it, you’ll get more for it than if you’d bought something else?

Over the years I’ve encountered clothes-appreciators who think this way. They’re enthusiasts, but guided in their enthusiasms by an explicit awareness of the resale market, and who rarely buy anything they don’t see a good chance of eventually selling. A menswear dude once told me he tends to get tired of garments within about 6-12 months. With that in mind, he’d taken to only buying clothes from labels with enough hype to guarantee solid sell-through rates on Grailed, so that, when he inevitably lists them to subsidize the purchase of new clothes, he gets a good return. Kind of like going car shopping and checking the Kelley Blue Book values on each contender.

The logic there is clear, but (besides the fact that letting the herd dictate how you dress in this way is obviously corny) thinking about copping sick clothes in the same way your uncle thinks about buying a Toyota Corolla bums me out and makes my eyes glaze over. I don’t want to saddle something that’s supposed to be fun with a bunch of inane accounting and “portfolio management” tasks. I don’t wanna calculate “cost per wear” — a concept I first encountered during the #menswear era, deployed to justify buying expensive denim — as though that’s a remotely meaningful metric when it comes to either financial prudence or the lived experience of feeling good in clothes.

Put simply, I don’t wanna feel like I’m doing my taxes every time I look at my closet. I want to rock fire clothes, feel great in them, get outside, see people, make things, go to dinner, and live life baby!

I started thinking about all this the other day when Erin and I caught wind of a well-funded new fashion fintech startup that embodies and exploits Cursed Liquid Asset Portfolio Mindset. This company embeds in your browser, following you around the internet, and when you come across a product counted among “1+ million” eligible items, it offers you an algorithmically determined Guaranteed Buyback™ price: If you cop a jacket for x, this company promises to cop it down the line for y, “listing and selling your item through our trusted resale marketplace partners.”

The language the company uses to describe itself is high-flown. On the FAQ page there’s a shout out to “the circular economy” as the company pitches itself as a means to “prioritize quality over quantity,” “future-proof your closet,” pad “your financial cushion” by re-envisioning garments as holdings, and — you knew this was coming — 🥴 “shop sustainably” 🥴.

So that’s surveillance capitalism mixed with chain-smoking-style consumerism, plus the Cursed Liquid Asset Portfolio mindset, dressed up in some HOGWASH about how financially and environmentally responsible it all is.

When you read the fine print, you learn that any given “Guaranteed Buyback value remains constant for a specified duration (typically 3 to 12 months),” after which it’s subject to reduction. In other words, the company seems to incentivize people to sell new garments in under a year, if not under 3 months. Either end of that range is gross. Also, according to Business of Fashion, the company “generates revenue from its retail partners” — i.e. it doesn’t just make money off resale, but from the sale of new clothes.

As the company’s founder put it in an article last year, their mission is for “merchants to increase sales, consumers to buy more and better, and both to enjoy the benefits of resale without doing any reselling whatsoever.”

Who knows if this company will prove successful. It launched with $24 million in initial funding, a significant sum that suggests that capital likes what it’s selling. (Or maybe capital just likes all the consumer data the company stands to collect — for all the money coursing through the resale game, after all, it’s still a hard place for platforms to actually turn a profit.)

What’s most fascinating and potentially depressing about all this, however — what interests us beyond this particular startup — arises in the final part of dude’s quote above, about “the benefits of resale.”

Resale is typically framed as a way to sidestep over-consumption and opt out of a wasteful industry. But recently, resale has been increasingly co-opted and COOKED by the industry, to the point it’s starting to abet, exacerbate and provide cover for the exact problems of over-consumption and waste it supposedly lessens.

As lifelong thrifters and proud secondhand-slapper hunters, Erin and I love a “pre-loved” piece. Of course we sell secondhand pieces, too (when we don’t donate them or give them to a friend). We’re far from alone in this: A recent estimate put the 2023 secondary market for shoes, clothes and accessories at $177 billion globally, projecting that it will reach $350 billion by 2027.

Within the apparel industry, resale is seen as intimately connected to the consumer habits of younger people in particular. A fascinatingly mask-off Harvard Business Review article from last November about “The Resale Revolution” underscored the importance to Gen Z of sustainability talk, and reported that “many major brands, recognizing that Gen Zs represent an important part of their future, have come to the same conclusion: Resale is a way to get younger consumers onto the ‘ladder’ of their product portfolio.”

Notice here how sustainability is figured from a business POV as a ladder — not a ladder up toward, e.g., “a better, cleaner future,” the way you might see on a brand’s Our Mission page, but a ladder up toward selling more new s**t. It’s refreshing to see blunt candor on a topic that’s generally so full of empty pantomime: “The most compelling reason to initiate resale programs, of course,” the author writes, “is to drive sales and profits.”

From a Mach 3+ clothes-rocker’s perspective, the most compelling reasons to buy secondhand are threefold. One is that it’s a reliable way to assert your own taste, display a command of “swag history,” and rock unique things. Two is that the apparel landscape has become increasingly binary — cheap fast-fashion dogs**t on one side, expensive artisan/luxury garments on the other — and secondhand clothes now help stand in for the disappearing middle.

And three, most pertinent here, is where we tell ourselves, “that’s one less new garment sold, and one less old garment headed for the landfill.”

OK — that sounds plausible. But does it actually add up? With the multibillion-dollar explosion in the resale market over the past several years, can we see anything that resembles corresponding drops in the production of new clothes, much less drops in the volume of pre- and post-production waste?

The answer is, No, we cannot. We can’t even begin to make sense of the scale of production, in fact, because the apparel industry refuses to make this information public. For a December 2023 article, Vogue Business “reached out to 20 companies” to ask how many units the brand had produced in 2021 and 2022, and how many it was on track to produce in 2023 and 2024:

“Few responded. H&M, Prada, Gucci owner Kering and VF Corporation, parent company of The North Face, declined to share production data … so, too, did Uniqlo parent company Fast Retailing, citing competitive reasons, and LVMH, which said production volumes are “confidential and strategic information” that it doesn’t share externally.

Asos, Gap, Mango, Nike, Marks & Spencer, Burberry, Patagonia, Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger parent company PVH did not respond to Vogue Business’s emails.

Chanel did not respond with figures but said in a statement that it “pays particular attention to sustainability issues, including those related to production volumes.” Shein, which also did not share figures, said its on-demand production model allows the company “to test new products by launching them in small initial batches of 100-200 items.”

As far as textile waste, one environmental-journalism nonprofit estimates that 92 million tons are produced annually, and that if the current trends hold, “the number of fast fashion waste is expected to soar up to 134 million tons a year by the end of the decade,” while, in the same timeframe, “the industry’s global emissions will likely double.”

The beast that is fast fashion darkens any simplistically sunny thinking about the climate benefits of resale: If megatons of new clothes are s**tty flimsy proto-garbage to begin with, they can’t be resold. We’ve written before about The Death of Thrifting for related reasons, and we didn’t even mention stories of fast-fashion pieces showing up at secondhand shops for more money than they originally cost, because it’s actually more expensive to sort, clean, label, and stock these used garments than it was for the companies to make them.

But you can’t hang all this on fast fashion, either, because true sustainability is of course A) extremely difficult and B) bad for the bottom line across the apparel industry. They’ll never say this to you, but they say it amongst themselves, readily. That Harvard Business Review article — which states that its intended audience is “leaders” — suggests that sustainability is best approached as a matter of marketing, the more superficial the better:

“In many product categories, if a company wants to commit to sustainability, it has to address a complex and difficult set of issues regarding sourcing, manufacturing processes, and distribution systems. And it must be mindful that too strong a commitment to sustainability can encourage consumers simply to buy less and keep their goods longer—a noble aspiration but a thorny problem for companies that need to remain profitable and grow. It’s also a problem for the U.S. economy, which currently relies on consumer demand for 70% of gross domestic product.”

There you have it — everything you really need to know about how companies think. And yes, this author is just one ex-Wharton dean, but look your boy Young Spyplane in the eye and tell me the position expressed here is meaningfully different from that of 99.999% of “leaders” in the business.

Put it all together and it feels like resale is getting twisted into just another corporate greenwashing tool. I’m reminded here of how airlines sell carbon offsets as a supposed fix for the pollution of air travel. Companies that create problems with their products love to sell you other products that supposedly “solve” those problems!

In a similar way, I don’t see how apparel-industry buzz about scaling “the circular economy” — the rise of in-house pre-owned lines, startups offering Guaranteed Buybacks, etc. — boils down to anything besides selling secondhand deck chairs on the Titanic. Civilization is facing enormous threats created by a rapacious and unfettered market, but don’t worry, we can save ourselves by making the ~RiGhT cOnSuMeR cHoIcEs~.

Spy Nation: Cop secondhand clothes, by all means. Hold on to cherished pieces for years & years. You will look cooler than someone who cycles itchily through garments, you will save money, and for whatever it’s worth, you will “reduce your carbon footprint.” As always, what we really need on that score is regulatory action — in this case things like mandated supply-chain transparency, import limits, maybe caps on production, some degrowth s**t, etc.

And yes, if you want to scrounge & plot & scheme on how to get an expensive piece, and this involves selling off some underloved pieces you already own, more power to you. Everybody does this, us included. But that’s a special situation, not an ongoing business model, where you turn your clothes into an unending chain of interlinked financial instruments until you die.

You are not a portfolio manager. You are a Mach 3+ Spyfriend. Rock fire clothes, feel great in them, get outside, see people, make things, go to dinner, and live life!

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