Resale 2026: From Thrift to Retail’s Operating System
For more than a decade, resale lived on the edges of retail: fragmented, inconsistent, and often treated as a side hustle. That era is ending. As highlighted in Forbes’ Resale Market 2026: From Thrift to Retail’s Next Growth Engine, resale is no longer just growing, it’s becoming foundational to how modern retail works. The next phase of resale won’t be defined by who builds the biggest marketplace. It will be defined by who builds the infrastructure.
From Thrift to Professional Resale
Resale has matured rapidly. What once felt like digital thrift now increasingly looks like modern retail: professional pricing, authentication, fulfillment, and customer experience.
The numbers reflect this shift. Secondhand apparel continues to grow at double-digit rates, with online resale expanding even faster and projected to reach $317 billion by 2027.
But growth alone is no longer the story.
What matters now is how resale scales.
The market is evolving into specialized, professional models: brand-led resale programs, category experts, wholesale supply networks, and embedded trade-in experiences. Together, they signal a clear transition: Resale is moving from marketplaces to operating systems.
The Real Bottleneck: Inventory and Distribution
Despite explosive demand, resale still runs into two structural constraints:
Access to quality-assured inventory at scale
Distribution for a highly fragmented, offline resale ecosystem
Much of the best secondhand inventory still lives offline, in independent resale stores, warehouses, and local operators. This inventory is curated, authenticated, and professionally managed, yet largely invisible online.
At the same time, many online resale experiences struggle with inconsistency, limited trust, and unreliable supply.
This is the gap that infrastructure must solve.
That's why we're building the Operating System for Resale
At Circular, we believe resale’s future isn’t another standalone marketplace.
We’re building the operating system for professional resale. The infrastructure layer that connects supply, quality, and distribution across the entire secondhand ecosystem.
That means:
- Bringing offline resale online at scale
- Unlocking quality-assured secondhand inventory
- Standardizing processes across intake, pricing, and listing
- Solving distribution for a fragmented resale supply base
By professionalizing resale end-to-end, we’re laying the foundation for a marketplace where trust, consistency, and supply are built in - not patched on later.
Infrastructure First, Marketplace Next
Marketplaces only work when the underlying system works.
Our approach starts with infrastructure: tooling, data, and automation that make resale scalable and profitable for professional resale operators. From there, liquidity compounds.
This is how resale becomes:
- Easier for sellers
- More trustworthy for buyers
- And viable at true retail scale
The result is a marketplace for quality-assured secondhand. Powered by professionals. Built on top of our operating system for resale.
Why 2026 Is the Inflection Point
As Forbes notes, resale in 2026 will look less like a separate category and more like a core retail capability: embedded into trade-in flows, loyalty programs, post-purchase journeys, and inventory strategy .
But that future only works if resale is operationally sound.
The winners won’t just participate in resale growth.
They’ll enable it.
Resale is entering its infrastructure era
The opportunity isn’t just to capture demand - it’s to unlock supply, professionalize operations, and connect offline and online resale into a single system.
That’s what we’re building at Circular: retail’s operating system for resale, and the foundation for the next generation of secondhand marketplaces.