Seen from marketplaces, second hand is only growth. Seen from the sorting centers, it is a sector on the verge of saturation. The forgotten link: reseller supply.
In 2025, Vinted claimed 10.8 billion euros in sales for its sellers in France. The same year, the State sanctioned the eco-organization of the textile sector with a fine of 170,000 euros, and the sorting centers declared themselves overwhelmed. Everyone comments on the spectacular second hand endorsement. Almost no one looks at the upstream that feeds it. However, this is where everything will play out.
Let’s clarify where I’m talking about
I am co-founder of a second-hand clothing wholesaler, Friptadium. We buy by weight, we sort by hand, we resell lots to Vinted resellers, to live sales facilitators on Whatnot, to thrift stores. We might as well assume it from the outset: if the second hand becomes structured, we benefit from it. The bias is real.
But a bias does not cancel an observation. And the observation is stubborn: resale demand has exploded much faster than the sector’s capacity to supply it correctly. It’s this gap that I see every day, and which we never talk about.
A resale that has become professionalized faster than its sourcing
The market, first, to set the orders of magnitude. Xerfi estimates French second-hand sales at nearly 14 billion euros in 2024, including around 7 billion for fashion alone, growing at around 12% per year. Fashion alone accounts for nearly 40% of the sector. Vinted claims more than 23 million users, or nearly a third of the population, and was the leading clothing seller in France in the first quarter of 2025, ahead of Amazon and Kiabi.
Behind these figures, a profile has changed. Alongside the individual who empties his cupboard, a population of semi-professional and professional resellers has emerged. For them, the second hand is no longer a one-off gesture, it is an activity. And an activity needs a regular, predictable, calibrated supply.
However, it is precisely the least equipped link. The dealer who wants volume buys unsorted bales, where the share of actually salable pieces remains a lottery. Anyone who wants quality struggles to find truly selected lots, with the composition announced in advance. Between the two, the offer designed for a professional who thinks about stock rotation, and not a stroke of luck, remains rare. A word of advice, in passing, that I repeat to all those who are getting started: a resale turnover is never a profit. The value one derives from a lot depends first of all on one’s own work of selection, staging and service.
A fragmented upstream, today under tension
The chain that leads from abandoned clothing to resold clothing is long: collection, transport, sorting, classification by grade, wholesale resale, then retail resale. In France, it made it possible to collect 289,393 tonnes of textiles, linen and shoes in 2024 according to Refashion, or 4.2 kg per inhabitant, for 206,136 tonnes actually sorted. Since January 1, 2025, separate collection of textiles has been mandatory throughout the European Union. Mechanically, incoming volumes will increase further.
The problem is that the upstream has difficulty handling this increase in load. Sorting operators, largely from the social and solidarity economy, say they are overwhelmed. The gradual closure of export outlets and the influx of very low quality clothing from ultra fast fashion dilute the truly resalable portion of each tonne collected. In April 2026, the State sanctioned the sector’s eco-organization and published new guidelines making traceability a condition of its financial support. The signal is clear: the more resale demand rises, the more the upstream that feeds it becomes weakened.
Sorting, where value is created or destroyed
In this chain, sorting is the moment of truth. A ton collected has no uniform market value. It all depends on the fineness with which we separate the resalable from the recyclable, then the resalable by category, by season, by quality level. This work remains largely manual. A serious sorting can aim for more than 90% of parts in very good condition on its best grades, but human error remains possible, and no honest operator will promise you 100%.
It is this know-how that online reselling underestimates the most. The reseller judges a supplier on the regularity of his grades, on the clarity of what is announced to him, on the consistency from one batch to another. Opaque sorting means time wasted on arrival, unsold goods piling up, profitability collapsing. The quality of upstream sorting determines, even more than the purchase price, the actual performance of the downstream reseller.
What remains to be built
The next stage of maturity in the sector will not be played out on a new consumer platform. It will be played out on the reasoned industrialization of upstream B2B. Seen from my place, three projects take precedence.
Transparency of the grade, first: announce a composition and a level of quality, then stick to it, rather than selling chance by the kilo. Traceability, then, now backed by European regulations, which must become a commercial argument and not an imposed constraint. Finally, logistical regularity: a professional reseller needs regular restocking, just like any retailer.
Second hand has won the cultural battle and that of demand. Its growth, twice as fast as that of new, will not weaken. What remains is the least spectacular, but most decisive, battle: that of its supplies. Some will continue to count the sellers and the downstream billions. Others will build, far from the spotlight, the logistics that will decide whether the promise keeps.
