For brands, resale presents both a chance to strengthen consumer loyalty and a challenge to their traditional business models. The growth of brand-owned recommerce platforms allows fashion houses to extend product lifecycles, retain control over quality, and enhance their sustainability credentials. Experiments such as Ralph Lauren’s partnership with the World Economic Forum and Vestiaire Collective on digital traceability show how authentication technology can protect reputation and deepen consumer trust.65
But there are further risks: resale can cannibalise sales of new products if not strategically managed, while the cost of authentication and repair services remains significant.
Resale also offers brands a strategic opportunity to expand their market reach. By participating in take-back or trade-in programmes, brands can reconnect with lapsed customers, engage younger and more value-conscious segments, and introduce first-time buyers to higher-quality or premium products at more accessible price points. These models not only extend the lifecycle of garments but also create new touchpoints for brand engagement, strengthening loyalty while broadening the top of the customer funnel.
However, brands now face a deeper structural tension: while the rapid growth of resale is largely being captured by third-party platforms, brands themselves are increasingly responsible for financing the regulatory foundations of circularity. Upcoming requirements such as EPR, digital product passports and right-to-repair legislation will require brands to absorb significant costs – from redesigning products for durability to funding national textile-collection and sorting systems. Yet the economic value generated through resale today still flows primarily to peer-to-peer marketplaces and proseller platforms, meaning brands are not yet fully participating in the commercial upside of the circular transition.
But there are further risks: resale can cannibalise sales of new products if not strategically managed, while the cost of authentication and repair services remains significant. Studies highlight that branded recommerce must be carefully priced and positioned to avoid undermining exclusivity or margin strength, with its greatest value often lying less in direct resale revenue than in reinforcing perceptions of durability, quality and long-term brand prestige. By framing recommerce as an enhancement of brand identity rather than a discount channel, companies can mitigate risks while capturing reputational and sustainability benefits.66
This asymmetry, where brands shoulder regulatory obligations but platforms capture most transaction value, also raises strategic questions about long-term competitiveness. Without the scale advantages of major marketplaces, many brand-run resale programmes remain small, operationally costly and difficult to monetise. Over time, the brands that succeed will be those that integrate resale as a capability (not just a campaign), whether through revenue-sharing partnerships, access to resale data, or models that allow brands to benefit financially from extended product lifecycles.
Scaling repair services in fashion also remains a persistent challenge. While repair-based models clearly support sustainability by slowing the product lifecycle, empirical research emphasises that high operational costs and structural inefficiencies, especially when compared to fast-fashion paradigms, impede their expansion. A significant part of these operational costs is also influenced by product design itself: many garments are not created with repairability, durability or reuse in mind, making refurbishment labour-intensive and costly.
Circular strategies such as repair, resale and recycling undeniably face cost and efficiency hurdles, but as consumer demand for sustainability grows and technology and policy support improve, these models can evolve from margin pressures into long-term sources of resilience, loyalty and brand differentiation.67
