Field Study: The Rise of Recommerce
For any investor, this stat should stop you dead in your tracks: The Secondhand Market is projected to double in the next 5 years, reaching $77B.
Secondhand, or recommerce, will grow at 11x the rate of regular retail. If that doesn’t smell like opportunity, I don’t know what does. We at Alpaca wanted to investigate the white space in the recommerce market, which has matured over the last decade, but is seemingly poised for future incremental growth.
What is Recommerce
This is such a big topic to cover, but generally recommerce is defined as powering the re-use of goods. That can mean both reselling as well as renting of goods; that can mean everything from fashion to furniture; that can mean a merchant, brand or consumer as the seller; that can mean a business model that is P2P (peer to peer), a managed marketplace, or a layer of the tech enablement stack. When it comes to recommerce, I like to take the simplified view and split the market into two big buckets: marketplaces where goods are bought/sold, and the enablement layer of recommerce where companies are powering the reuse of goods via technology and logistics.
