For about fifteen years, everyone selling secondhand clothing has made the same case: people will buy used clothes, actually, if you photograph them well, wash them and take the guesswork out. It was a real argument once, and it needed making.
That argument is over. ThredUp's fourteenth annual resale report, out in April, puts the US resale market at $55.5 billion in 2025, around 12% of the $458 billion Americans spent on clothing, footwear and accessories last year. The US secondhand market grew about 13%, against 3.6% for clothing retail generally, which the report calls four times the pace of the broader market. Globally the category reached roughly $257 billion and is projected at $393 billion by 2030. 59% of American consumers bought something secondhand last year.
I read these reports because I build a wardrobe app and have to, and the growth figures are the part I skim. The page I went back to this time was the supply section, which the report heads "Supply is the New Constraint," capital N and all. Make selling "just as easy as clicking 'buy,'" it argues, and $23.3 billion of incremental US market value comes loose. So the industry spent a decade and a half persuading people to buy secondhand, won, and is now saying in its own report that what caps its growth is getting hold of the clothes.
Then August brought earnings season, and nobody sounded short of anything. The RealReal posted an all-time-high quarterly GMV of $617 million, up 22% (its fourth consecutive quarter above 20%), and raised its full-year outlook citing "the continued strength in our supply trends." ThredUp's James Reinhart told his own Q2 call that "active sellers grew to record levels, with quality keeping pace." Vinted closed 2025 with €10.8 billion moving through it, up 47%. A supply crisis declared in spring, and record supply reported all summer.
Both are true, and how they are both true is what this piece is about. When these companies say "supply" they do not mean clothing. Clothing may be the least scarce manufactured object on earth; ThredUp alone has processed more than 200 million unique secondhand items from 60,000 brands. What is scarce is described clothing: a garment with photographs, a brand, a size, a condition grade and a price, the kind of record a database can actually use. Between a thing existing and a thing being sellable sits a listing, and somebody has to sit down and make it.
A disclosure before I go further: I am building a wardrobe cataloguing app. That gives me a stake in where this argument lands, and you should read the rest knowing it.
The clothes are not missing, which is what makes this bottleneck strange rather than just hard. There is no shortage of garments in the developed world, quite the reverse, and everybody knows it. The inventory exists. It is hanging four feet from where its owner sleeps.
What the industry cannot do is get it out of there. The biggest companies working on the problem have landed on answers so different they barely look like the same business, though each one is really answering a single question: who does the paperwork.
The RealReal's answer is people. On the Q2 call in August, CEO Rati Levesque described a sales force that goes out and sources supply rather than waiting for it: "our assortment is curated, not accumulated." It is a nice line. It is also an admission that the most efficient way this company has found to move a Bottega bag from a closet into commerce is to employ a human being with a relationship to the closet's owner.
The supporting numbers are all field-sales numbers. Supply per sales rep, up 15% year to date. 44% of new consignors in the quarter converted from people who were already buyers, up from 40% two quarters earlier, per CFO Ajay Gopal. A referral programme, Real Partners, runs through "professionals like stylists and real estate agents who already have the trust of luxury consumers," and those referrals, Levesque said, consign four times the value of an average new consignor. Roughly a quarter of new consignors come in through the physical stores.
Stylists and real estate agents are people who have stood inside the home, sometimes inside the closet itself. The RealReal has more or less concluded that the way to find out what somebody owns is to send someone to look. It works: Q2 GMV was $617 million on $192.6 million of revenue. It is also expensive, and it grows the way a sales organisation grows, one hire at a time.
Vinted went the other way: take the human out entirely and make listing so cheap that supply turns up on its own. No seller fees on the core marketplace, a phone camera, a few taps. Its 2025 results, published in April, came to €10.8 billion of GMV, up 47%; €1.1 billion of revenue, up 38%; and €62 million of net profit, down 19%, because it was spending on logistics, payments and new markets. Profit falling in a year when volume grew by nearly half is the line in that release I keep rereading. CEO Thomas Plantenga's stated ambition is essentially an operational one: "be the most cost-efficient, be the most reliable and easy to use."
ThredUp's answer, this year, is money. Its Q2 had active buyers up 21% and revenue up 17%, and Reinhart told the call the company is targeting a stronger premium mix "through seller incentives, new acquisition channels for premium sellers, and continuing investment in the seller experience." This is a company whose model starts with a bag you fill and forget, and it is now paying for the good closets. That is a wage negotiation over work the industry has always gotten for free. Whether it can afford the raise is a fair question, because the same afternoon ThredUp's stock fell about 28% on lowered guidance and a $7 million promotions headwind.
Three companies, one bottleneck, three theories. One thinks the barrier is knowledge and sends a person. One thinks it is effort and strips out the friction. One is starting to think it is pay, and finding out what the labor costs.
The report's own survey fills in the rest. 66% of consumers said they are comfortable letting AI manage a "digital closet" on their behalf, identifying what to sell based on market demand. 36% said they would resell more often if payouts were faster. 32% said they were open to reselling if it were convenient enough, with minimal effort to set up listings. (An earlier draft of this piece had a sharper version of that last number: a third of the people who said nothing would motivate them to resell, changing their minds for an AI-automated listing process. I could not pin that framing to the report's own text, so you are getting the verified shape instead. It is enough.)
Put together, those answers say the refusal to sell is mostly not a principle. It is fatigue dressed up as one. They also point at something all three companies are only glancing at. Vinted has already made the listing form about as cheap as a listing form can be, and supply is still the constraint, so the friction is not in the form. It sits a step earlier, in the part nobody has built for. You cannot sell, lend, insure, re-wear or even seriously think about a garment you have forgotten you own.
The closet is the largest uninventoried asset pool in consumer goods.
It is worth a meaningful fraction of half a trillion dollars in the US alone, it turns over constantly, and the only systems that can see inside it today are a person with a clipboard and a woman's own memory.
The second-order effect is already showing up, and I think the industry has underpriced it: resale value is reaching back into the first purchase. 60% of consumers told ThredUp's survey that resale value is a key factor when they buy something new, up double digits in a year. 39% said they are encouraged to buy a new item when they know its resale value will hold. 52% of Gen Z and Millennial respondents have tried to resell more than half of their closets, and 57% of resellers say they do it for income (61% among Gen Z).
That is not a sustainability sentiment, it is a spreadsheet. If a coat's second sale is part of its first price, the coat stops being a purchase and becomes a position, with an acquisition cost, a holding period and an exit. You can find that grim. I mostly don't. Clothes cost more and last less than they used to, and the people pricing in the exit seem to me to know exactly what they are doing.
It does mean the moment fashion has always treated as the end of the story, she bought it, now sits somewhere in the middle. The garment keeps having a life, and so far nobody is keeping the books on it.
So: my read, offered as opinion rather than fact.
I don't think the next five years in this category get won at the transaction. The transaction is solved; there are more than enough places to sell a jacket, and the good ones are very good. What is not solved is the state of the closet, and every downstream business in the category sits on top of it. Resale, rental and lending all run on supply, and insurance, repair and styling all need to know what is in there.
ThredUp's own framing is that selling has to become as easy as buying. I would push it further back. Buying is easy because someone else already did the describing. Selling has to become as easy as knowing, and right now knowing is the expensive part. That is why America's best-known luxury consignor pays a sales force to go and look, and the rival whose model starts with a bag you fill and forget is starting to pay the sellers themselves.
I would rather stop there than tell you what that is worth. I have a stake in the answer, and you already know it. But the fact holds whoever reports it: the clothes already exist, in quantities nobody disputes, four feet from where their owners sleep, and the whole industry built on top of them is still working out how to find out what they are.