Steve Madden and Dolce Vita have each partnered with recommerce solution provider Recurate to launch peer-to-peer resale marketplaces designed to boost circularity for their respective footwear brands.
Steve Madden’s “Re-Booted” and Dolce Vita’s “Re:Vita” programs will let customers sell their preowned shoes directly on each retailer’s respective site. Users can submit their own product photos and descriptions and select a recommended price for their items, which will then be authenticated and approved by the respective brands to appear on the resale page. Browsers can see comparison images of the original product to better understand the exact appearance of the shoes.
Once an item is purchased, the seller will receive a prepaid shipping label to send it to its next owner. Once the buyer verifies the condition, the seller receives store credit. The process is designed to reduce the retailers’ environmental footprints and reduce the need to handle the logistics of shipping items to a third-party warehouse.
“Steve Madden and Dolce Vita are thrilled to enter the resale market with Recurate as our partner,” said Gregg Meyer, Chief Sustainability Officer at Steve Madden in a statement. “It’s no secret that millions of tons of clothing and shoes are incinerated or sent to landfills each year, and changing this will require changing the ways that we think about creating and buying fashion.”
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Resale is an increasingly hot market for retailers, with a projected value of $47 billion by 2025, according to ThredUP. The sustainability factor is particularly important to resale’s growth: a survey by Coresight Research found that 29% of shoppers feel environmental sustainability was more of a factor in their shopping choices now than before the pandemic.
Several retailers entered the resale market in 2021, including:
- Nike: The retailer launched Nike Refurbished, which takes like-new, gently worn or cosmetically flawed shoes that have been returned within the company’s 60-day “wear test” window and fixes them up to be resold at Nike stores;
- Etsy: The craft marketplace acquired resale marketplace Depop for $1.6 billion to extend its reach both in the apparel sector and with Gen Z consumers; and
- Crocs: The retailer introduced Clean Out, enabled by ThredUP’s Resale-as-a-Service (RaaS) solution, which is part of Crocs’ commitment to become a net zero carbon footprint company by 2030.
