Good morning, Broadsheet readers! The Biden administration is attempting to protect legal abortion patients, women overtake men in the Dutch cabinet, and Ellie Austin, Fortune’s deputy editorial director of live media, shares a new interview with Samina Virk, a luxury fashion resale CEO confronting an evolving market. Have a wonderful Wednesday!
– Getting thrifty. The combination of the pandemic and soaring inflation have resulted in a rocky few years for many retailers. The resale fashion market, however, is one sector of the industry that has thrived amid the uncertainty.
According to the analytics company GlobalData, the U.S. resale market is expected to grow eleven times faster than the broader clothing sector by 2025. Online thrift store ThredUp predicts the global market for secondhand apparel to be worth $350 billion by 2027 as consumers prioritize affordability. (Data shows that while environmental concerns motivate Gen Z to shop secondhand, sustainability isn’t as important a factor for other age groups.)
Although resale remains big business, many secondhand fashion sites are struggling to achieve profitability in a sector known for its low margins. Last year, ThredUp reported net losses of $92.3 million, while the luxury resale marketplace The RealReal was $196 million in the red. There are also the added obstacles of consumers pulling back on nonessential spending and brands such as Lululemon, COS, and Zara launching in-house resale platforms to rival third-party sites.
Vestiaire Collective, a leading luxury fashion resale platform headquartered in Paris, is one company at the center of these conflicting forces. Founded in 2009, it has raised over $560 million from investors including Goldman Sachs and Softbank. The company achieved unicorn status in 2021 but doesn’t publicly disclose its earnings. As the resale market evolves and confronts challenges, Samina Virk, Vestiaire Collective’s CEO of North America, is banking on collaborations with brands such as Courrèges and Chloé to help ensure the company’s longevity. With these partnerships, Vestiaire Collective hosts dedicated resale platforms for each brand. It also runs the pricing and selling process.
“There’s a lot of opportunity for how we sit alongside brands,” Virk said at Fortune Brainstorm Tech in Park City, Utah, last week, during a conversation with Fortune’s Phil Wahba. “There’s room for all of us, whether it’s peer-to-peer marketplaces, brands [or] consignment stores.”
In collaborating with Chloé, for example, Vestiaire Collective accesses prestige products that are likely to be perennial bestsellers in the secondhand market. Chloé, meanwhile, outsources resale logistics while potentially gaining a new customer base.
“We’ve done a few different surveys with customers and we’ve found that over 60% of our secondhand buyers discovered a new brand for the first time,” says Virk, who rejoined the company this year after serving as its U.S. president and CMO from 2014 to 2017. (In between, she served as CMO of the personal shopping platform Threads Styling.) “Of that figure, over 50% of them would buy the brand again.”
The first fashion resale platform to become a certified B Corp, Vestiaire Collective is working to eradicate fast fashion from its website. Its other priorities include authentication (a team of experts checks every item submitted for sale to ensure that it isn’t a counterfeit) and tailoring the shopping experience to individual users.
“We’re putting even more steps [in place so that] the right product is coming [up for] the right customer,” says Virk. “So [it’s about] the next step in personalization as we grow.”
Ellie Austin
ellie.austin@fortune.com
@Ellie_Austin_
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ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
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- Majority rule. Women outnumber men in the Dutch cabinet for the first time in history after Mariëlle Paul became the minister for primary and secondary education last week. Bloomberg
- Respect the game. Haruna Takata, chair of Japan’s professional female football league, is speaking up about her country's poor treatment of its female soccer stars. Takata claims women players are judged more for their “visual appeal” than technical skill. She nearly had to crowdfund the broadcast of the upcoming Women’s World Cup because no Japanese network seemed interested. Bloomberg
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MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Sabrina Bailey has been named CEO at Fiducient Advisors. Meredith Hawkins has been promoted to chief people officer at GoTo, while Attila Török is GoTo's new chief information security officer. Cindy Holland has been named global CEO of SISTER.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
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- Warren vs. Musk. In a letter to the SEC earlier this week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) asked the commission to investigate any possible “conflicts of interest” or “misappropriation of corporate assets” when Elon Musk was CEO of both Tesla and Twitter late last year. Fortune
- 'DEI hysteria.' José Luis Bermúdez, dean of Texas A&M’s College of Arts and Sciences, has stepped down amid controversy over the hiring of journalist Kathleen McElroy. McElroy, who spent 20 years at the New York Times, was attacked by what she calls “DEI hysteria” once students learned of her work on race and diversity in newsrooms. Texas Tribune
- Disney crusade. Heiress Abigail Disney's campaign against private jets and their environmental damage came to a head last week when she was arrested outside of an airport in the Hamptons. Disney, along with 13 other demonstrators, were charged with resisting arrest and disorderly conduct after chaining themselves to the airport entrance. Fortune
ON MY RADAR
How Gretchen Whitmer made Michigan a Democratic stronghold New Yorker
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PARTING WORDS
"I don't give a damn what other people think of me... Because I know who I am and I like who I am."
—Suze Orman on knowing her worth
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