The second-hand fashion market has been on the rise for the past 10 years (Ryding et al., 2017) and there are no signs of slowing down. In 1990, the second-hand fashion market amounted to €150 million in sales a year, up to €1.5 billion in 2005 (Baden and Barber, 2005), and now worth over €130 billion (Business of Fashion, 2021). One might say that this rise is just because of the rise of the clothing industry as a whole, however, during the pandemic; sales of new clothes plummeted while old clothes kept on rising in sales (ThredUp, 2019). The value created from the second-hand fashion market has been captured by a few new online markets; most notably Grailed, Depop, and Vestiaire, as well as some old players, such as eBay and Farfetch. Earlier this week, Balenciaga (2022) announced that they would start buying and selling used clothes from and to its customer.
However, this blog post will not talk so much about Balenciaga’s and other potential brand-exclusive resell programs. I am more interested in how artificial intelligence (AI) can help online marketplaces such as Grailed and eBay. A big problem in marketplaces where individuals sell to other individuals has always been the possibility of receiving a fake item. Of course, PayPal can help to a degree, but what if you do not know that the clothing item you bought from eBay and wear is fake? Grailed makes you take many detailed pictures of your clothing item before it gets authenticated by an employee, and eBay has an authenticate program. However, this process is slow, and it leads to human error, which is normal, but not acceptable, especially if you decide to buy a Hermès Birkin bag that can cost up to a hundred thousand euros. Right now, Entrupy is leading the way in using AI to authenticate items (Entrupy, n.d.), however, you need to have the item in hand to authenticate it, which makes it harder for Grailed or eBay to authenticate the item as they are only the intermediate. It is a step in the right direction and sellers could use Entrupy to prove that the item they are selling is real (however, the application is costly). In the future, Grailed and eBay (and the other marketplaces) should look to implement similar AI solutions to authenticate items that are being uploaded on their page as it will lead to faster authentication, less time spend authenticate, and possibly more accuracy, and hence satisfied users.
References
Baden, S., & Barber, C. (2005). The impact of the second-hand clothing trade on developing countries.
Balenciaga [@balenciaga]. (2022, October 14). Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle with the Balenciaga Re-sell Program [Instagram reel]. Retrieved October 16, 2022, from https://www.instagram.com/reel/CjsXn63qDON/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
Business of Fashion. 2021. Resale: Inside the $130 billion secondhand fashion market. Retrieved October 16, 2022, from https://www.businessoffashion.com/videos/sustainability/the-bof-show-with-imran-amed-episode5-resale/
Entrupy. (n.d.). Luxury Authentication. Retrieved October 16, 2022, from https://www.entrupy.com/luxury-authentication/ n.d.
Ryding, D., Wang, M., Fox, C., & Xu, Y. (2017). A review of secondhand luxury and vintage clothing. Sustainability in fashion, 245-266.
ThredUp, 2019. 2019 Resale report. Retrieved from https://cf-assets-tup.thredup.com/resale_report/2019/thredUP-resaleReport2019.pdf
