This week, we take a look at the rise of auctions as a business model for secondhand fashion. Auctions provide a potential deal and gamification for customers, higher prices for sellers and a good source of data for the marketplaces that host them.
Fashion consumers today are taking to the auction block.
Thanks to the rise of resale and live shopping platforms like Whatnot, more Americans are buying their secondhand fashion in competitive auctions, rather than straight transactions. Whatnot, which operates livestreamed auctions, reached a $20 billion valuation with over 20 million new accounts created this year, for example. Adobe data from this spring found that nearly 40% of American consumers had purchased from a livestreamed auction.
Bezel, a marketplace for secondhand watches, sells in both a marketplace model and with auctions, with auctions rapidly growing in popularity. Auctions now make up around 45% of all sales on the Bezel platform, according to co-founder and CEO Quaid Walker.
The move toward auctions has also come for resale platforms that don’t typically sell in that channel. ThredUp, known for its typical marketplace resale model, partnered with Whatnot earlier this month to begin hosting livestream auctions from its distribution centers in Dallas and Atlanta.
ThredUp’s leadership pointed to the $22 billion market value of the live shopping industry as reason for the move. The idea is to bring the millions of SKUs that ThredUp handles to Whatnot’s massive audience.
“With fashion as one of Whatnot’s largest categories, and with a highly engaged community of buyers, we see this as an incredible opportunity to meet the next generation of secondhand shoppers where they are,” James Reinhart, CEO of ThredUp, said at the time of the launch. “This launch is also just the beginning of what we can do together as we explore the endless possibilities for how our combined technologies can further support existing Whatnot sellers grow their businesses.”
The rise in auctions goes beyond marketplaces like Bezel and Whatnot. Closet sales, where customers can buy rare and personal items from celebrities and influencers, often take the form of an auction. EBay has brought IRL auctions of archival fashion pieces to New York Fashion Week in recent seasons. And this weekend, the French fashion retailer Le Bon Marché is hosting its first-ever women’s fashion auction, selling a collection of archival Japanese fashion on October 17.
But what is it about the auction model that’s so appealing to both buyers and the marketplaces that offer them?
For the marketplaces, auctions can provide a valuable source of data, according to Walker. Bezel hosts a few hundred new auctions every day, curated by an internal auction team, adding up to thousands each month. Marketplaces typically have data on what customers bought, what they returned and what they put on their wishlist. With auctions, they now also have data on what customers tried to buy and how much they’re willing to spend on it.
“We spend a lot of time with the data trying to understand price,” Walker said. “A lot of other businesses that are analyzing watch price data are scraping listing prices from the internet. But a watch listed at $10,000 might sell at $8,000 or $12,000. Right now, we’re just using this data to flag good deals to customers and to retarget them, but we have a lot more planned around using that data.”
For example, Walker said Bezel’s concierge service can build out a more accurate profile of a buyer’s preferences and desires based on what they’re bidding on. Then, if they get beaten out in an auction, the team can help them source a similar watch elsewhere, or connect them directly with a seller the next time that watch goes back on the market.
Walker said Bezel also takes a more active hand in auctions than in listings on its marketplace. Sellers ultimately decide if they want to auction their watch or not, but Bezel advises them if they think a watch will sell better at auction, and the team often will group similar watches together to auction on the same day as part of a curated drop. Commission rates are the same whether sellers sell at auction or not, and Bezel sometimes offers incentives like better commission rates or credits to encourage them to sell at auction as part of a curated drop.
As for what the buyers get out of auctions, price is a major component, Walker said. All auctions start at $750, and while most end up selling at close to the market rate, it’s not impossible for buyers to get lucky with a good deal. For rare, one-of-a-kind watches, auctions can have the opposite effect, with prices going up as buyers fight for rare watches.
“Because we have new auctions every day, it’s also a great discovery mechanism,” Walker said. “I discovered an Audemars Piguet Oval watch, which is like their version of the Patek Philippe Ellipse. Ellipse sells for hundreds of thousands of dollars, but I had no idea there was a similar watch from a world-renowned brand, and it was selling for like $20,000 at auction. I didn’t get it, but now it’s on my list. From a customer perspective, you get to see watches you never would have seen otherwise, and it informs your personal vision of what you want your collection to look like.”
Stat of the week
On Etsy, searches for men’s brooches are up 70% according to data released by the marketplace on Wednesday afternoon.
The data comes from Etsy’s 2026 Fall/Winter Trend Edit, which also highlighted an increase in searches for other dramatic items like vintage jewelry, capelets and jacquard.
News to know
- High gas prices drove inflation up to 3.7% last month, according to new data from the Consumer Price Index. Higher consumer prices are expected across a wide range of products in the coming months.
- Riyadh Fashion Week in Saudi Arabia was supposed to begin on October 15, but regional conflict involving Houthi militants in the region forced the event to be postponed until next year.
- Nike released a new version of one of its most coveted sneakers, the Jordan Royal, but reaction has been mixed. It’s selling below retail price on StockX, indicating a lack of hype for the brand that created the modern hype sneaker market.
