ThredUp’s 2026 Resale Report finds the global secondhand apparel market grew 13 percent last year and is on pace to hit $393 billion by 2030 — and CEO James Reinhart says the biggest wave is still ahead.
Most people who list their first item on a resale platform don’t stop at one. That behavior — sell, relist, repeat — sits at the center of ThredUp’s 2026 Resale Report, released Thursday, which found the global secondhand apparel market grew 13 percent last year, outpacing new apparel sales that were nearly flat and drawing on research from analytics firm GlobalData.
“Resale is proving its durability,” ThredUp cofounder and CEO James Reinhart told WWD. “What we’ve been talking about for a number of years is that you would see these generations of young people, in particular, adopting resale at higher rates and that you would see continued penetration and wallet share gains by resale.”
Between 2025 and 2030, the global secondhand market is projected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of about 9 percent, reaching $393 billion — twice the pace of the overall apparel market. In the U.S., resale is growing four times faster than retail overall and is on track to hit $78.8 billion by 2030. “You’re starting to see that,” Reinhart said. “It’s playing out a lot the way we thought. And not all of it is obvious to the investor community or others. But I think if you look under the hood, there’s a lot of growth across a bunch of these categories, across a bunch of these companies.”
The long game
ThredUp was the fastest-growing fashion stock last year, up 354.7 percent to $6.32 a share — though shares have since pulled back to $3.39, with a 52-week high of $12.28. Reinhart points to TJ Maxx, one of TJX’s powerhouse off-price brands, as a parallel.
“Everybody wants everything to happen right away and people forget that TJ Maxx was started in the early ’80s,” he told WWD. “And it didn’t actually really take off until the financial crisis in ’08. If you actually go and look at the stock chart, it’s pretty interesting. Basically, it’s nothing. There’s no movement for 25 years and then it’s a rocket ship and it sort of parallels the adoption curve as consumers felt more stretched in the financial crisis.”
The resale natives
A generation that grew up buying secondhand is now entering peak purchasing power, and Reinhart has a name for them.
“We call them resale natives,” he said. “They grew up shopping secondhand. And so the mindset of how they will consume in the future — people generally underestimate, but it’s not wild to believe as this group has more and more purchasing power 10, 15, 20 years from now, that 80 percent of their closet isn’t secondhand.”
The report maps out the structural shifts ahead. Supply of secondhand goods — not consumer demand — is resale’s primary constraint. Competition is shifting from acquiring new shoppers to capturing greater wallet share. Discovery is migrating off resale’s own platforms, with nearly half of activity now happening across social feeds and outside digital channels. AI is reducing friction across the buying and selling experience, making the category more scalable.
“Once people do it and kind of do it once, it’s kind of like breaking the seal,” Reinhart said. “I think you’ve got to break the inertia of it. Then you really start to see momentum. It’s pretty rare that you have somebody who is a seller or supplier in the resell market who a year later is not still doing it.”
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