At amusement parks, it’s the ride operators who, for safety reasons, use hand clickers to count how many people get on the Tilt-A-Whirl. But when it comes to one of retail’s bigger attractions in recent years—branded resale—it’s ThredUp that’s been doing the counting.

Along with ranking the 100 brands with the most active resale programs, ThredUp’s The Recommerce 100, which is updated monthly, compiles retailers and brands who’ve launched resale programs.

Among the brands on the current list, 39 launched in 2023, including H&M, Kate Spade, and Carhartt. As impressive as it is that so many brands cracked the list this year, even more did so in 2022, when 72 brands on the list launched their resale programs that year.

In November, the brand with the most resale items listed was Madewell, with 28,623 items, followed by 2023 newcomer American Eagle (25,667), Tea Collection (24,200), and Athleta (23,010).

Here are some takeaways from the year that was.

Keep reading here.—AAN

It’s that special time of year again. You probably know it all too well. Fierce competition. Countless hours spent fine-tuning messaging and poring over consumer data. ’Tis the season, so that means you need to have strategies in place.

Luckily for you, we teamed up with Intuit Mailchimp to give you an interactive toolkit with solutions to help curb those age-old holiday season marketing headaches. We’re talkin’ actionable strategies backed by stats and research.

Wanna know what we’re covering? You’ll learn how to:

• use segments to better reach your audience
• effectively implement owned channels into your strategies

Say goodbye to seasonal slog.*

We asked our reporters, who play so well with others, to choose a favorite story from 2023 by a Retail Brew colleague.

Retail Brew reporter Jeena Sharma writes about luxury and fashion, topics that, at least to someone in this reporter’s tax bracket, can seem random and arbitrary, blown about as they are by the inexplicable winds of trends and commerce.

But Jeena, blessedly, has a well-honed sense of the absurd, as was on display in her long-running weekly feature, Friend or Faux (RIP), in which she challenged readers to distinguish three absurd-but-true retail news items and one absurd-but-false one she had made up.

So who better than Jeena to bring us a story in June in which the manufacturer of a humble rumpus room staple, a beanbag chair, collaborated with a 128-year-old luxury crystal and jewelry brand?

Keep reading here.—AAN

We’re resharing some of our favorite stories of the year. Today, we’re taking you back to July, when Andrew Adam Newman explored how good (or not good) resale sites should look.

At The Lead Innovation Summit that took place in New York recently, James Reinhart, the co-founder and CEO of ThredUp, was being interviewed onstage by Danny Parisi, senior fashion reporter at Glossy.

Reinhart offered advice to brands embarking on launching their own branded resale sites, particularly about how their resale e-commerce site should look compared to their main sites.

Reinhart said that it’s a “mistake” when brands “want their resale site to look as good as their new site.” When it comes to the resale site, “you want it to look good, but there’s a different price point and a different expectation” among consumers buying secondhand, he said.

As a brick-and-mortar analogy, Reinhart noted that brands “don’t put as much money” into building out their outlet stores as their other retail stores.

“Brands want parity” in the aesthetics of their e-commerce and re-commerce sites “and I actually think that’s the wrong strategy because you want to maintain the elevated experience of your new product, which is a really critical piece,” he said.

We asked three other leaders in the resale industry about how they think the sites should look—and they saw it much differently.

Read the whole story here.—AAN