New Balance is finally joining the rest of the sneaker industry in getting in on first-party resale. Starting on Monday, the 118-year-old brand is offering New Balance Reconsidered, a program through which customers can exchange their used New Balance sneakers — sent by mail or delivered to a store — for a voucher to use toward their next online purchase. New Balance describes the voucher’s value as “dynamic, based on the seasonality and condition of the product traded in.” Those pre-worn shoes will be sold on New Balance’s online store in a new section of the website labeled Reconsidered.
New Balance is the latest brand to make this move, joining the ranks of other sneaker brands like Nike and Adidas. Over the last two years, brand-owned recommere channels have also been launched by a plethora of non-sneaker brands, including Patagonia, The North Face, Steve Madden, Mara Hoffman and Diane von Furstenberg. While the move toward recommerce began in 2022, 2023 showed that the trend had no signs of stopping. Secondhand fashion grew to be a $20 billion market in the U.S. last year, and it’s likely to keep growing, according to Insider Intelligence. That growth is driven primarily by Gen Z customers.
For New Balance, the launch is as much about sustainability as it is about keeping up with consumer shopping trends. The brand has committed to the Science Based Targets Initiative, which is the United Nations’ emissions reduction initiative that aims to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius. It’s also planning to reach 100% renewable electricity for its operations by next year.
“We know the footwear industry has a significant environmental impact, including too many products ending up in a landfill,” said John Stokes, director of sustainability at New Balance. “There are many things that have to shift. Launching Reconsidered is one piece of the puzzle, with a program objective to help extend product life for some of our products and get the most from what is already made.”
The platform, which will be promoted through New Balance’s social channels and available on its e-commerce site’s homepage, is powered by Archive, the resale technology company that raised $15 million in funding at the beginning of last year. Archive has signed on a slew of brands over the last year, including Pangaia in September. Other resale service providers like Recurate and Trove have also signed a vast number of brands over the last year. And while no brand-owned resale channel is likely to surpass a third-party marketplace like StockX, which can carry a much larger variety of brands, these channels are often more about brands reclaiming at least a portion of the resale revenue of their products while also keeping customers invested in the brand’s ecosystem.
Emily Gittins, co-founder and CEO of Archive, told Glossy that the interest in opening a resale channel through Archive has “increased exponentially” in the last year. However, Archive, which charges brands both an initial fee and a commission on each sale, has become more selective about which brands it signs on with.
“We have a process of evaluating brands before we sign with them,” Gittins said. “They have to have a quality product that can stand up to being worn many times, and they need to have enough product to have a liquid marketplace. There are a lot of great brands who are interested and want to launch resale one day, but they just don’t have the scale yet.”
New Balance’s other partner in Reconsidered is Tersus Solutions, a textile recycling company that will handle the cleaning and warehousing of all resold New Balance products. The in-store drop-off feature is being piloted at eight New Balance stores across the U.S.
New Balance is a privately held company and will likely remain so in the future, so it doesn’t report or reveal its annual revenue typically. The last revenue figure publicly available was given last year by managing director Joe Preston, who said the brand’s 2022 revenue was over $5 billion, a 21% increase over the year before. That makes New Balance smaller than Adidas and Nike, which, in terms of revenue, are five- and ten-times larger, respectively. But the number puts New Balance on par with Under Armour, which also sees around $5 billion in annual revenue.
“Offering this ourselves is an important part of taking more responsibility for the products we put into the world and is an important step toward creating a more circular footwear industry,” Stokes said. “We have to start taking steps to learn and adjust. Bigger picture, this focus on longevity and circularity feeds into our ambitious climate goals, which does include finding new ways to generate business value that is not solely dependent on new product creation.”
