The increasing popularity of selling and reselling pre-owned fashion through social apps is helping to fuel the movement toward circular fashion. Depop, ThredUp and Poshmark are just a few of the popular platforms that are enabling the trend to flourish, and with the serious money involved, it’s a certainty that more resale platforms will emerge and the circular economy will continue to grow.
We’re not only going to see new platforms for trading “pre-loved” items arise, expect a growing number of established retailers and brands to implement their own circular initiatives as they adapt to a changing consumer culture. For example, GenZ shoppers are just as mindful of the environment as they are their wallets. Resale gives them a way to minimize the impact on both. Established brands and retailers are increasingly taking note, and, to keep themselves on good terms with this large consumer contingency, they’re making moves toward sustainability. And taking a share of the resale economy pie.
While re-commerce certainly is a growing industry, there are a number factors that retailers and brands need to keep in mind when operationalizing their programs. For one, it’s important to ensure the authenticity of the products that are being sold, and this can be difficult when inventory is coming from any and every consumer. The de facto standard is that the brand or retailer will manually verify the authenticity of products, which requires they train every associate to identify a multitude of nuances. It’s an inefficient process that deters the business from scaling.
It’s also ineffective. People are people. We have our own biases and tendency to make errors. Whether it’s fatigue or a fondness for a particular person bringing in an item or a host of other factors, the result is the same: counterfeits end up corrupting the supply chain. Once word gets out that XYZ sold a fake, their reputation is damaged and consumer trust in that platform and perhaps the whole resale economy erodes. So, too does the platform’s revenue.
The challenge is the same even when the reseller is a brand or retailer itself. So how can one accurately separate the authentic from the fake at scale? This is the problem Entrupy was born to solve.
Entrupy’s solutions have been powering circular fashion for a number of years now. Our Luxury Authentication solution helps retailers and re-commerce platforms around the world to verify that the items they’re selling are exactly what they are purported to be. We are able to certify over 20,000 different designer bags and accessory styles from the top 15 luxury brands in the world. Most importantly our solution provides results in under 60 seconds and with over 99.3% accuracy. Further, each of these authentications is backed by a Financial Guarantee. This offers a great leg-up for retailers to embrace circular fashion at scale.
For other types of items, Entrupy Fingerprinting offers a solution for re-identifying products that are coming back to them from consumers. The brands just registers each product during the manufacturing process, creating a virtual tag that remains forever in the cloud. Each item is unique, and so is the tag – it’s a combination of a seven-digit code and a unique, visual fingerprint. When a customer submits a product to the brand’s pre-owned marketplace, the item can be reverified using the same process, and in three to five seconds, the results will show the item either is or isn’t one that was previously registered. The process is easy to incorporate in existing workflows, and it can be used by every associate regardless of expertise, which supports unlimited scale. Also important, the process does not require physical modification of the product, the fingerprints can’t be tampered with and the information remains highly secure, unlike other identifiers like RFID tags, barcodes and even QR codes.
Trust is Entrupy’s middle name. If you’re a brand or a retailer thinking about joining the circular economy, we’re here to help you get started on your sustainability journey. Just reach out to us at [email protected].
