When Grace Han landed her first fashion gig as director of social impact at Faherty, it came with an unexpected second title: chief executive of resale.
Han had no experience in resale when she joined the brand in 2022. Her previous experience included a similar role at the women’s coworking space The Wing, teaching second grade and recruiting for educational institutions.
Faherty was in the process of launching a peer-to-peer sales platform (it went live in June 2023), which it saw as a way to extend the life cycle of its products, and contribute to its circularity mission. To the company, Han’s versatile resumé, rich with experience working on complex assignments across multiple departments, was a big plus.
Today, many brands have hired teams specifically to pursue resale, or have added the category to existing executives’ purviews. They span fast fashion — Shein’s “Exchange” — to activewear, with Lululemon’s “Like New” and even luxury, with Ulla Johnson’s “Ulla PreLoved.” Secondhand fashion remains a minor sales driver for most of these companies, but with the right structure and management they can be profitable boosts to a brand’s marketing and sustainability credentials. At Faherty, the resale programme generates less than 1 percent of total revenue, but is growing fast and “pays for itself,” Han said.
Staffing up this new business line can be a challenge, however. Because these teams are still relatively new, there isn’t a vast pool of resale specialists to draw from. The way resale works also varies from brand to brand — some emphasise circularity, others see it more as a marketing tool. And it can involve skills ranging from experience in sustainable fashion to supply chain logistics to budget management.
So the people working in these business units are an eclectic bunch — which is part of the draw.
“When we’re building something as potentially powerful as resale — it’s a massive economy that is still taking shape,” said Lauren Lotka, founder and CEO of talent agency and consultancy Lotka & Co. “It’s a real draw for talent if you position it that way … because talent today want to be a part of something that has an impact and that is solving complicated problems.”
How to Pick a Resale Chief
A few brands, including Urban Outfitters, run their own resale platforms. Most hand the behind-the-scenes mechanics off to software providers, including Archive, Recurate and Trove.
Even so, having the right in-house point person, whether it’s a “CEO of resale” or part of an existing executive’s responsibilities, is critical to the viability of these programmes.
Brands typically assign a senior or director-level employee — often from marketing, social impact (since sustainability is typically a focus), or operations and logistics — to lead the launch of resale.
After choosing a provider, that executive’s role involves liaising between that company (in Faherty’s case, Archive) and the brand’s internal teams in areas like logistics, marketing and finance but also continually advocating for resale as both a social impact initiative and a contributor to the bottom line. (Faherty also has a back-end resale partner, Tersus Solutions, which cleans, repairs and stores reused items.)
“The role I play is essentially like a project manager,” Han said. “[Resale] takes someone who’s had some experience managing budgets in order for you to be able to understand the financial model … and be able to make the case for it being a revenue driver.”
At M.M.LaFleur, the resale programme, Second Act, is steered by the company’s director of operations, Kartinah Smith, who also oversees customer experience. The brand’s founder Sarah LaFleur has been adamant about treating resale as an integral part of its business — positioning re-usability as a selling point for its garments, said Maria Costas, M.M.LaFleur’s director of brand and integrated marketing.
“We had been communicating to our customers that part of the value of shopping with us is the longevity of our styles and … ‘here’s how you can pass them on,’” Costas said.
Smith’s operations experience meant she was extremely “process driven,” which helped the brand anticipate and address any kinks in its supply chain and figure out whether it had the right mix of items (and sizes) flowing through to facilitate peer-to-peer selling.
Smith’s “innovative” thinking and knack for analysing data, said Costas, also helped the brand identify an opportunity in refurbishing damaged goods so it could increase the volume of pieces for sale on Second Act.
Resale as a Skill Set
Like any brand CEO, a resale chief needs a supporting team to carry out their vision and ensure things run smoothly. These team members typically come from functions such as marketing, e-commerce, and logistics.
In larger companies (like The North Face or Patagonia), this may involve a dedicated resale team of up to 10 employees. At smaller brands, like M.M.LaFleur and Faherty, the resale lead enlists those other employees on a case-by-case basis, making secondhand a “fractional part” of their permanent responsibilities, said Ryan Rowe, Archive’s co-founder and chief technology officer.
Getting brand employees to view resale as a desirable area to work can be a challenge, experts say. As a relatively new function rooted in sustainability, resale is sometimes seen by managers and staff as a nice-to-have rather than a core money-making business line where top talent would want to make their mark.
“Sustainability in resale is always a double edged sword,” Rowe said. “Championing [resale] is critical, but also dangerous in that you might have stakeholders … who look at resale as a sustainability initiative, and therefore devalue it.”
While sustainability will always be an important outcome of resale, leaders like Han are also working to position resale as a business-critical function that requires employees to tap into and develop valuable cross-functional skills — such as a marketing lead who learns operations and logistics, or a supply chain manager who identifies a new revenue stream.
“There’s definitely a business side to it,” Rowe said. “It [requires] understanding what matters to the core business and how resale is going to impact that positively, and being able to communicate that clearly and consistently.”
Like Faherty’s, M.M.LaFleur’s programme is also logging revenue gains — knotching 50 percent growth year-over-year in 2023, Costas said. The company says growth skyrocketed when it added a dedicated tab to its homepage and enlisted marketing talent (Costas herself) to regularly create resale campaigns and initiatives for stores and online. In the spring, Costas piloted M.M.LaFleur’s first in-store event where the brand sold pre-owned styles alongside new looks for the season.
“I believe resale is becoming table stakes for brands, so if you have the opportunity to work on a resale program in any capacity, regardless of what your role is, it would be valuable,” Costas said.
