• by Julie Michael , May 7, 2025

The conversation about luxury resale has matured beyond whether brands should participate. Most sophisticated CMOs already maintain authenticated pre-owned programs or partnerships with leading resale platforms. The more pressing question is whether your current approach is leaving significant value on the table. This question becomes more critical as economic constraints have driven consumers further towards preloved markets for aspirational brands.

What's becoming clear from my work with luxury clients is that resale isn't merely another distribution channel -- it's a hidden data goldmine that most luxury houses aren't properly excavating. While third-party resale platforms capture pricing insights across thousands of brands, individual brands typically analyze only their own secondary market performance, missing crucial competitive intelligence and arbitrage opportunities.

The brands outperforming in this environment aren't just running resale programs, they're building sophisticated trading ecosystems. Here's what they're doing differently:

They're leveraging price elasticity disparities between primary and secondary markets. In certain product categories, secondary market prices demonstrate consistently greater elasticity than retail, creating opportunities to harvest margin through buy-back guarantees on select pieces that can be profitably resold through controlled channels.

They're using insights from resale patterns to inform primary market design and production decisions. By identifying which elements drive disproportionate secondary market retention value, these brands are engineering specific attributes into new collections to maximize full lifecycle profitability.

They're addressing the luxury resale market's most significant friction point: authentication speed. One luxury brand reduced verification time from days to minutes by embedding proprietary NFC verification tokens into products at manufacturing. The technology follows pieces throughout their lifecycle while harvesting invaluable ownership journey data.

Importantly, the most innovative brands are moving beyond the either/or mentality of in-house resale versus platform partnerships. They're creating hybrid models that maintain brand control while leveraging third-party scale. A luxury brand could implement an innovative "authentication-as-a-service" model to certify their products on external platforms while capturing customer data and relationship opportunities.

The economic headwinds facing luxury consumers haven't dampened the desire for exceptional craftsmanship, but they've permanently altered how value is assessed. And the secondary market isn't simply reflecting this new reality -- it's actively shaping it.

The real opportunity isn't running a resale program, but building an integrated ecosystem that captures value across the entire ownership journey, creates proprietary customer acquisition channels inaccessible to competitors, and transforms the secondary market from a threat to a strategic asset.

The question for luxury CMOs isn't whether to embrace resale, but whether their current approach is sophisticated enough to create genuine competitive advantage in an increasingly complex luxury ecosystem, where ownership has been permanently redefined.