ThredUp Publishes the Resale Numbers — It Is Also a Resale Company

What the Report Is, and Who Makes It

ThredUp's annual Resale Report, produced in partnership with the research firm GlobalData, puts a dollar figure on the US secondhand apparel market and projects its growth over the following decade. The 2024 edition placed the global secondhand market at $227 billion, with a projected rise to $350 billion by 2028. These numbers land in trade press, investor decks and parliamentary briefings, often attributed simply to "industry data."

The conflict is structural, not conspiratorial. ThredUp is a for-profit resale platform — one of the largest in the US — whose valuation depends partly on investor belief in secondhand market expansion. The firm that produces the underlying model, GlobalData, is a commercial analytics company. Neither the full methodology nor the underlying data are published in a form that allows independent replication.

What the projections have historically done is run optimistic. Earlier Resale Reports projected resale overtaking fast fashion in consumer wardrobe share by the mid-2020s — a threshold that primary market data from Euromonitor and Statista has not confirmed. Vestiaire Collective and Vinted reached profitability while the primary market slowed, which supports directional growth, but growth at the pace ThredUp's charts depict is harder to verify.

Independent data points exist but are partial. Euromonitor tracks secondhand as a sub-segment of apparel retail in selected markets. The Textile Exchange Materials Market Report records fibre flows, not consumer transactions. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation has published estimates of clothing utilisation rates. None of these produces a comprehensive, annually updated resale-market figure to set beside ThredUp's.

The report is not useless — it aggregates consumer survey data and platform transaction trends that would otherwise be scattered across proprietary sources. But readers citing its projections should note what the Textile Exchange and comparable bodies make explicit that ThredUp does not: who funds the number, and what the funder gains if the number is believed.