Branded resale tech company Trove has had a busy 2024. In May, Terry Boyle took over as CEO, and in August, Trove acquired its competitor, Recurate. Last month, Trove rolled out a new feature with Patagonia, one of its earliest clients, called the Resale Plugin. It allows brands to seamlessly slot in secondhand options alongside new products on their e-commerce stores.
Trove’s acquisition of Recurate was a significant change to the competitive landscape of branded behind-the-scenes resale. Since around 2022, Trove, Recurate, and other competitors including Archive, ThredUp, Reflaunt and Caastle, have been on a spree of signing new brands to their platforms. Levi’s, Patagonia, Oscar de la Renta and Abercrombie & Fitch are among brands that have debuted resale channels powered by one of these companies in the last two years.
But Trove is now well-positioned as a leader in the space. After the acquisition of Recurate, Trove now holds around 75% of the branded resale market and offers both inventory management and peer-to-peer resale. It has raised over $150 million in funding since its inception in 2016. According to Boyle, the next year will see Trove increasingly focused on an aspect of branded resale that is still nascent: the integration of brands’ secondary and primary channels.
“We’ve transitioned from resale being something that committed brands do because it’s good for the environment to something all kinds of brands do because it’s good for business,” Boyle said. “Brands want to play with mainline integration, featuring their resale right alongside their new items.”
Patagonia is the farthest along in this pursuit, Boyle said. With the Resale Plugin, it can embed pre-owned items anywhere on its site, including on the product pages of new items. Additionally, consumers can now check out both new and pre-owned items in the same cart, a small but significant technical change that wasn’t possible before. As of last year, only around 25% of branded resale programs offered the ability to combine new and secondhand goods into a single purchase. Patagonia’s revenue from its Worn Wear resale program is still relatively small, bringing in around $5 million per year as of 2024.
Boyle said that one of the most frequent concerns new clients have when working with Trove is the fear that resale — and, in particular, resale items positioned so close to their new items — will cannibalize sales. But data provided by Trove suggests the opposite. Around 80% of customers who buy a secondhand item from one of Trove’s clients are new customers of the brand, Boyle said.
And it’s not just young people who are open to secondhand goods as one may expect, Boyle said. According to a survey conducted by Trove, over 60% of Baby Boomers are open to buying secondhand online.
“It’s wild how quickly [resale] has become accepted,” Boyle said. “In Europe, the consumer is even further along than in the U.S. Some favorable legislation happening in Europe [like a law forbidding companies from destroying unsold clothing] will be really good for us. So international expansion in Europe is a big priority.”
And lastly, Boyle said both resale companies and brands should be prepared for the way that AI can help improve their margins. Trove has been working with an AI pricing tool that has already improved profit margins for its brands by 20% since its adoption earlier this year, Boyle said.
“We’re doing a lot with the supply chain and with AI that is making resale a lot more appealing for brands,” Boyle said. “Ultimately, our goal as a company is to make resale cheaper and profitable to get running.”
