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As Shoppers Increasingly Choose Resale, Thredup Launches Personal 'Fashion Footprint' Calculator

The company’s 2023 Resale Report outlines the continued growth of secondhand and its potential to curb the production of new clothes.

Photo: Imaxtree

Ever wonder how much impact your clothes might have on the environment? Back in January 2020, ThredUp, the online thrift and consignment shop, released a tool to help consumers gauge their “fashion footprint,” and offer resources and insight into how they might be able to reduce it. Now, the company has revamped it, to take into account how the fashion landscape has changed since then. 

The Fashion Footprint Calculator is essentially a three-minute quiz that asks 10 questions about shopping frequency, location, shipping speeds, clothing care and more to rank a person’s impact from low to high, using data from third-party sources including studies conducted by GreenStory. The new-and-improved tool analyzes the environmental impact of buying secondhand versus new, uses updated data points and offers more resources for reducing impact. Since the calculator looks at general habits, it’s not able to give exact numbers for specific items — but that information is barely available regardless. 

“Over the past several years, we’ve grown increasingly aware of fashion’s environmental impact. What remains murky is how individuals can make a real difference in the face of greenwashing, overproduction, and underutilization of clothing,” Thredup Vice-President of Integrated Marketing Erin Wallace said, in a statement. “We hope our Fashion Footprint Calculator can serve as a guide to empower everyone in doing their part to help us collectively move toward a more circular fashion future.”

An example of the calculator’s results page.

Photo: Courtesy of ThredUp

While the Fashion Footprint Calculator is a helpful educational tool, it’s important to keep in mind that individual shopping habits only have so much of an effect. This tool can be used as a means of personal accountability, but companies must continue to be held to task for how their business practices — from labor to supply chain design to material choice — contribute to environmental impact. 

The company also released its 2023 Resale Report on Wednesday, with research conducted by third-party retail analytics firm GlobalData. It found that the secondhand market is expected to double and reach $350 billion in the next four years. Of the drivers motivating spend, value is at the top, followed by quality. According to Thredup, 82% of Gen Zers consider the resale value of apparel before buying it; 64% look for an item secondhand before buying it new.

ThredUp is expecting a lot of shifts in the fashion retail market in the next several years. Fast fashion’s market share (about 14% in 2022) is expected to remain flat or marginally decrease over the next 10 years. The same is expected for retailers like Costco and value chains like Walmart, while secondhand is expected to at least double. As it is, 88 brands launched dedicated resale programs in 2022 — a 244% increased from 2021. Department stores, meanwhile, are expected to halve in market share. 

As the climate crisis escalates, the growth of resale has the potential to help cut clothing production, which contributes to carbon emissions and landfills through an average of 100 billion new garments made annually. But will that actually happen? Well, according to Thredup’s findings, more than one-third of traditional retailers said they’d cut production of new products if resale proved to be successful for their business.

You can find the full report here.

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Source: Fashionista.com

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