7 Timely Takeaways from ThredUp's 2025 Resale Report

and how to apply them to your sustainable closet or resale business.

I’m Emily Stochl 👋 for the last seven years, I’ve covered resale, becoming a go-to voice on where vintage & secondhand fashion is headed.

I’ve interviewed 250+ vintage dealers, shoppers and collectors on Pre-Loved 🎤 a reader-supported platform on all things secondhand.

You come to Pre-Loved for trend insights on circular fashion — you stay for practical takeaways you can apply to your own sustainable closet, or resale business.

Resale is booming — growing 2.7x faster than traditional retail — but the forces shaping its future are more complex than ever. As the latest ThredUp 2025 Resale Report reveals, consumers are embracing secondhand shopping at record levels, yet ‘making a sustainable choice’ isn’t their primary motivator.

Instead, value-driven decision-making is leading the charge, with affordability and access to higher-end brands ranking above their climate concerns.

At the same time, the industry faces major challenges. While demand for secondhand is skyrocketing, the supply of quality resaleable pieces remains limited. This might seem counter-intuitive given fashion’s continued overproduction. However, the low-quality of the vast majority of new clothing undermines the circular fashion model.

Meanwhile, economic pressures — like inflation and tariffs — are reshaping consumer spending habits. This raises important questions: What does it take to make secondhand fashion work — for shoppers, for sellers, and for the planet?

With resale at these inflection points, ThredUp’s annual report identifies key trends, and I’ll help you understand it all, so you can be ahead of the curve.

We’ll talk about both the challenges and the opportunities — like: where can fashion-tech make the biggest difference? How should a vintage business work with social media tastemakers? What to make of TikTok’s outsized impact and the potential looming ban?

I’ll contextualize all these findings for you with advice you can use now: how to market your secondhand business in a way that meets your community where they’re at, how you beat volume-overwhelm, and the strategies retail brands are already using for customer acquisition (that you should borrow)!

Whether you shop or resell pre-loved fashion — or you just love to showcase your cool finds online! — let’s unpack what it all means and how it will impact you.

Here’s what you need to know about where resale is headed in 2025: