The clothing resale industry is growing at light speed. With 2019 sales topping $28 billion, buying second hand has clearly shed the stigma of being reserved for those who cannot afford full price. Consumers now view buying second hand, or vintage, as a way to save their pocket and the planet. Are you a retailer in this segment? Congratulations, you’re enabling a circular economy that’s fighting global pollution. Here are three tips shared by resale giants around ways to grow your clothing resale business.
Better Garment Insights
A major concern when buying second hand clothing is knowing if the garment will fit. Most garments available for resale have been worn and washed many times. Meaning they’ve most likely stretched or shrunk beyond their original specs. Therefore simply knowing the garments size is not enough to ensure a preferred fit.
This problem can be solved by including a few measurements on the product page. The largest global resellers understand the importance of including the physical measurements of a garment. In fact, to prove this some ran a test by purposefully withholding the measurements to see how consumers would react. The outcome? Chaos. Learn from their research and include at least three measurements from each garment.
An additional tip on ways to grow your clothing resale business – include more than two garment pictures. Be sure to add a rear shot and closeups of distinguishing features. Also try to keep the look of the photos the same.
More Product
Although there is no lack of quality vintage garments, bringing in more to sell means additional resources spent on intake and upload. Thus your teams will dedicate more of their day on inspection, photographing and measuring. Whatever your method of acquiring new product to sell, Capture will cut time spent on these mundane tasks in half.
Capture is a patented software offered by Tailored which analyzes photos of clothing to extract measurement and other data. This data instantly transfers to your product listing, and thus reduces data entry and physical measuring tasks. Capture has been shown to reduce time spent on these tasks by an average of 65%.
Lastly, Know Your Customer’s….Fit
Traditional clothing retailers have a customer fit profile, or ideal customer, they produce clothing for. As a reseller you do not have an ideal customer because your inventory is comprised of one offs. Therefore it’s important for you to learn your customer’s fit preference early and often.
62% of all clothing is still purchased in physical stores because consumers aren’t confident they’ll choose correctly. They experience frustrations like getting the wrong size, the garment not having their preferred fit, and making return. This adds to your pain of processing the return or losing out on initial sales. Collecting a bit of initial data on your customer will go a long way in alleviating these pains. It will also improve their confidence and push them to buy. Not only buy, but buy and not return it to you.
At Tailored we also understand these pains. Which is why we created a tool to help solve them. Our Capture software allows customers to perform simple fit comparisons using the clothing they already own and love. By taking a photo of a well fitting item, Capture will compare the fit of that item to items you sell online.
Capture will sort your vast catalog for them and provide you with valuable fit data. This will help you turn a one time buyer into lifetime customer.
Get in touch with us today! We’d love to learn about your business and discuss how Tailored can help you reach your goals.