Resale Isn’t a Trend. It’s Retail’s Next Operating System.

Recommerce is now the clearest signal of what consumers value. 

Resale just went from a retail sideshow to center stage. eBay’s 2025 Recommerce Report shows 89 percent of consumers plan to maintain or increase their pre-loved spending this year, a number that should terrify any brand still running a channel strategy built for 2014. This isn’t a blip in consumer sentiment. It’s a secular migration — the kind that breaks incumbents and crowns new kings. Retail has spent a decade fixated on faster logistics, sleeker payments, and ad-tech gymnastics. Meanwhile, the consumer quietly rewired their preferences around value, identity, and circularity. The result: entire GTM motions need rewriting.

The drivers aren’t what the PowerPoint crowd thinks. Price matters, but meaning drives behavior. Sourcing Journal reports that nearly 60 percent of Gen Z prefers pre-loved over new because it aligns with their values and offers individuality that traditional retail can’t match. Consumers aren’t just buying goods; they’re buying a narrative — uniqueness, purpose, discovery. McKinsey’s 2024 State of Fashion (an often-belied report in the industry) also echoes this: the “new luxury” is defined not by logos but by limitedness and lower footprint. The emerging consumer is saying the quiet part out loud: “I don’t want what everyone else has. I want what makes sense for me.”

For the past decade, I’ve led GTM efforts across retail tech, recommerce, and supply chain platforms, and the pattern is always the same: the brands that win aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets — they’re the ones that catch the structural shift early. At Trove, that acceleration came when brands realized resale wasn’t cannibalization; it was customer acquisition at a discount. At Standvast, the signal was even louder: stockouts weren’t the problem — misallocated demand was. And now, according to the National Retail Federation, 44 percent of U.S. consumers say “product availability” and “price volatility” are forcing them to rethink where they shop. Recommerce isn’t just a sustainability play. It’s a pressure valve for the operational instability baked into modern retail.

So what do we do with this? We design for the future the consumer already inhabits. That means GTM strategies that treat recommerce as a core profit engine, not a CSR accessory. It means revenue models built around retention loops, uniqueness, curated scarcity, and circular lifetime value. It means acknowledging that Gen Z has made “new” optional and that the next generation of brand loyalty will be built on transparency, access, and intelligent inventory. The call to action is simple: adapt now, while you still get to choose — or wait until the market makes the choice for you.