Luxury resale, already on the rise, got a big boost last month. Luxury consignment company The RealReal and designer Stella McCartney extended their partnership, underscoring how much McCartney wants to keep items out of the landfill.
“Stella founded her brand with sustainability as the driving factor,” says Allison Sommer, director of marketing for The RealReal, who leads the company’s strategic initiatives including partnerships and sustainability.
Other luxury fashion brands are finally catching up. Over the last couple of years, Sommer says she’s noticed powerful organization around circular business models, sustainable textiles production, and environmental responsibility in the industry. Recently we caught up with her to find out how luxury fashion resale is changing.
What conversations are you having around circular business models?
The most exciting conversations for us are with luxury brands and retailers about how resale fits into the market. Only a few short years ago, there was a lot of confusion about how resale could be seen as anything but a competitor. Now there is this shift. More retailers and brands are proactively coming to us. They understand that there is a luxury-easy solution for customers to clean their closets and feel good about items that have more life left in them. Those customers have newfound income, which they can also put toward new seasons.
Brands are seeing this is fuel for their business. Instead of looking at The RealReal with perplexity or even potential animosity, now there is excitement around how to plug in a resale model and provide a luxury service for customers.
What are the biggest benefits of consignment?
We encourage all brands to think about how their garments are made. Consumers are becoming savvier about the impact the fashion industry has on the environment — it’s the second-largest polluter in the world. A lot of times customer values inform corporate values.
On the economic side, we ask our customers and consignors every quarter how using The RealReal has changed their shopping habits. The growing majority say that when they’re out shopping for new items, they’re checking the resale value. There’s an incentive for brands to make items that retain their value.
The environmental benefits stem from items that are made well lasting even beyond the useful life for that individual consumer. They can stay in the economy.
Are other luxury brands besides Stella McCartney considering resale?
There are definitely other brands thinking about sustainability as integral to their business, not as an afterthought. Whether the change is coming from consumers looking for it or from brands investing in innovative techniques, fabrics, or models, we’re at a tipping point.
Some of them, to be frank, are being forced to think about it due to bad publicity or practices that consumers are calling them out for, like inventory that’s being burned or not recycled. While we hope that brands become proactive in their commitment to sustainability, even a course correction is better than nothing.
What’s the current status of luxury resale in the market?
Resale is growing at a much faster pace than the luxury industry as a whole. That you can find in any sort of economic report, and we’re talking multiple times that in terms of resale. It’s customer adoption and it’s the industry embracing this as a great end-of-life solution for garments.
There are others working on end-of-life — brands like Patagonia and Eileen Fisher repairing or reconstructing items. As more customers and brands think of resale as a link in this ecosystem driving people back to investing in better-made items that they can resell, it’s good for our business and for the environment.
What are the biggest sustainability challenges facing The RealReal?
One is the rate of change. When we see a clear solution, we want people to get on board immediately and that’s not realistic. A lot of change is hindered or helped by the policy. I’m thinking of LA announcing fur is going to be restricted in the city. Those things can help. Same for internal logistics and shipping regulations. The head of sustainability at Stella was sharing that, to ship things internationally, a requirement is that the garment be in a clear see-through bag, which means plastic that’s bad for the environment. The policy change could help.
A second is the environmental impact of resale. We knew that the model itself was inherently green — we’re extending the life of something that’s already produced. But until recently we’d never been able to quantify the savings.
This year we invested in developing our sustainability calculator. There were a lot of challenges, assumptions, and averages that had to be made given that we don’t own the inventory we sell in terms of the supply chain. But we worked with an environmental consulting firm, Shift Advantage, and vetted the methodology and the results with leading sustainable textile experts.
We now have our first stab at the water, greenhouse gas, and energy savings of buying or consigning an item through our platform compared to what that would cost the environment if it had been produced new.
Where do you see consignment and luxury resale heading?
I’m an optimist and believe that every brand will have a resale solution. With a savvy customer set, the rising millennial values of protecting our environment and not producing waste, luxury resale will be an assumed part of luxury retail moving forward.
We are currently accepting submissions for the 2019 Environmental Leader Awards. Learn more and submit a project or product here.
