Once dismissed as a sustainability side-project, resale has now evolved into a strategic growth channel — one that sits at the intersection of profitability, loyalty, and cultural relevance. From Zara and Lululemon to emerging premium brands, resale is no longer an afterthought. It’s becoming a core strategy, woven into the primary commerce experience.

That’s why we’re thrilled to announce our investment in Brandback, the embedded resale platform redefining how brands reclaim value, increase conversion, and retain customers in a world where attention is more expensive than ever.

The Fastest Growing Retail Category

Recommerce has undergone a radical shift. What started as niche peer-to-peer platforms like eBay and Craigslist became purpose-built verticals like Vinted, Vestiaire, and ThredUp. Now, it’s entering a third wave: brand-integrated resale at scale.

The numbers tell the story. The global secondhand market is projected to reach $367 billion by 2029, growing 2.7x faster than traditional retail. Online resale, especially in fashion, is expanding even faster, already accounting for 14% of the $1.7 trillion fashion market as of 2024. This shift is no longer speculative; it’s visible in consumer behavior, brand priorities, and regulatory pressure on circularity. And yet, most brands are still locked out. Legacy resale tools are inflexible, operationally intensive, and often push customers off-platform, eroding both margin and experience.

Turning Secondhand into a Strategic Growth Engine

Brandback turns resale from an outsourced afterthought into a first-class commerce channel. Their product embeds natively at checkout, integrates with brands’ existing ecom stacks, and enables automated resale listings without any inventory burden. In doing so, it addresses some of the most burning issues retailers face today: rising customer acquisition costs, low conversion rates, and increasing difficulty in retaining customers.

Resale becomes a way to attract new customers (especially Gen Z), increase conversion on first purchases, re-engage existing ones through resale credit loops, and extend customer lifetime value by embedding resale into the loyalty experience. At the same time, brands retain full control over user experience, data, and margin.

A Team with Technical Depth and Strategic Clarity

What impressed us most about Brandback was the team’s ability to combine technical depth with strategic insight and execution speed. The founding team — Chris, Jan, Wlad, and Alex — has already shipped large-scale commerce products. Their product intuition is matched by a clear-eyed understanding of how to navigate brand partnerships, channel integrations, and evolving consumer UX expectations.

Their roadmap is equally ambitious, bringing the resale market into the future of Agentic Commerce — where buying and selling agents reduce friction for sellers, improve liquidity across the platform, and push the boundaries of what resale can do, not just as a feature, but as a fully integrated infrastructure layer.

Why Now and What Comes Next

We’re at a turning point in retail. Gen Z expects resale to be native. Consumers are more value-driven than ever. Regulation is pushing for circularity. And brands are struggling with margin pressure, paid acquisition fatigue, and the erosion of traditional loyalty mechanics.

In that context, Brandback offers more than a resale tool. It delivers infrastructure for a new kind of commerce stack — one that blends new and secondhand inventory, that integrates seamlessly into existing ecommerce workflows, and that compounds in value over time through agentic intelligence and cross-brand liquidity.

We believe that within five years, resale will be as common on brand websites as “add to cart.” The brands that lead this transition will not only grow faster, they’ll build deeper relationships with their customers, reduce waste, and increase lifetime value. Brandback is giving them the tooling to do exactly that, with zero operational lift and full brand control.

Discover more about Brandback here.