Brian Wisniach
Content Marketing
There’s a story some brands continue telling themselves about secondhand shopping… does it sound familiar?
Gen Z cares about the planet, fast fashion is destroying it, so naturally they’re thrifting their way to a cleaner conscience.
Sustainability is a motivating factor, and it's a great tagline. That’s likely why it’s been the default marketing angle for resale for most of the past decade. But the huge shift toward shopping secondhand is so much more than that. It's about cost of living, access to quality goods, and having the freedom to buy something and realize that it's not for you, without the guilt of wasting a purchase.
Ranking the selling points for secondhand shopping
We asked Gen Z shoppers why they bought secondhand, and sustainability showed up last.
None of the above numbers make the sustainability story unimportant. However, we learned that a brand that leads its resale messaging with carbon footprints and landfill statistics may be burying more important pain points.
What kept their parents away?
Secondhand clothing carried two real objections for decades. The first was whether what you were getting was actually clean, and the second hinged on whether buying used made you look like you couldn't afford new.
One full-time reseller put the timeline plainly: the stigma around wearing someone else’s clothes was still very real before roughly 2017 or 2018, particularly among older shoppers.
It’s worth noting that the hygiene concern specifically never went away. A study on secondhand clothing barriers found it cited by close to 75% of Gen Z and Millennial respondents, and about 79% of Gen X.
So, what has changed?
Follow the money, the grading systems, and the group chats
New goods have gotten relatively more expensive against wages than they were a generation ago. Resale platforms have spent years solving the actual uncertainty that used to make “condition” a real gamble: grading systems, return windows, seller ratings, photos from multiple angles instead of one blurry listing shot, etc.
As a result, the “cultural read” on secondhand flipped from “settling” to “taste,” which is a fundamentally different psychological cost than the one their parents were weighing… and fantastic news for resellers.
What the platforms and the creators already know
Seel customer, Poshmark, now accounts for roughly 19% of all secondhand clothing sales in the US, more than any other resale platform, ahead of The RealReal’s 14%. Poshmark’s own research found nearly half its sellers also buy on the platform, and users estimate an average of 38% of their closet is secondhand at this point.
In other words, people aren't unloading their closets and leaving. They're staying inside the category for both sides of the transaction, which is precisely the kind of recurring relationship a brand-run resale program could own instead of ceding to someone else's platform.
The content ecosystem tells the same story from a different angle. The #thriftflip hashtag alone has racked up over 264,000 posts on TikTok. Creators like Jules Wettreich have built genuine, six-figure-follower audiences purely around filming thrift trips and styling what they find, with individual videos crossing 15 million views.
So yes, people like thrifting content… no real shocker there. We’re pointing out that this audience is fluent in this format and hungry for more of it. And the good news is there’s more than one way to meet them: a creator partnership, a storefront that doesn't feel bolted on, or, closer to home, differentiation via the return window you already own.
The last piece (making it trustworthy on your own site)
How a brand handles returns and refunds on a secondhand purchase directly shapes whether that shopper comes back to buy secondhand from them again. The relationship is easy to start and just as easy to lose the first time the post-purchase experience falls short.
The reason Poshmark, and platforms like it, earned Gen Z's trust was a compounding combination of grading systems, seller ratings, and flexible return policies doing the work of making condition feel like less of a gamble.
Merchants who aren't in the secondhand market also play an important role in making the circular economy easier to participate in. Recommerce is one way that merchants and shoppers keep unwanted inventory back in circulation. For brands, this means giving their clothes — whether that's excess inventory, returned items, or even items that ended up forgotten and not returned at all — an extended lifecycle beyond an initial shopper.
Most brands don't have this resale infrastructure baked into their post-purchase experience. But a return window a brand already owns can do the same job a marketplace's seller rating does, if it's built to. Seel's Resale Agency exists specifically to close that gap: instead of asking a brand to build its own resale storefront, it surfaces a resale option directly inside the post-purchase flow the brand already runs, once the return window closes. Seel handles the listing, pricing, and payout, so shoppers get the same condition confidence a marketplace provides, without the brand having to stand up a vendor relationship or a separate program to offer it.
If you're thinking about whether your own post-purchase setup could carry that weight, talk to sales, and we'll show you exactly where that trust gap sits in your own funnel and what closing it is worth.
