DHL Launches Branded Resale | BoF

A serious worldwide logistics participant has entered the resale enviornment.

Germany-based DHL has partnered with resale-as-a-service agency Reflaunt, which creates branded resale providers for purchasers together with Balenciaga, Web-a-Porter and Ganni, BoF has discovered.

Utilizing Reflaunt’s backend software program, DHL can now provide its current model companions a handy and totally built-in resale service to supply to their customers.

Whereas the innovation isn’t distinctive — there are greater than a handful of resale-as-a-service suppliers that may construct comparable platforms for manufacturers, together with Trove and ThredUp — DHL brings unprecedented scale and effectivity to the trade, with greater than 1,300 warehouses and places of work worldwide. In any case, facilitating secondhand commerce isn’t low-cost, which is why platforms like The RealReal and ThredUp have struggled to achieve profitability.

The logistics big isn’t only a courier; it really works with plenty of style corporations and retailers in a number of touchpoints of their provide chains, serving warehousing and e-commerce fulfilment capabilities.

Usually, third-party logistics suppliers similar to DHL or XPO can’t help on-line resale fulfilment on their very own due to its sophisticated, single-SKU and reverse logistics necessities. When a buyer sends in a pre-owned merchandise, as an illustration, that single merchandise must be inspected, assessed for high quality and authenticity, measured, photographed after which listed on-line — features that fall outdoors the purview of conventional 3PLs that Reflaunt has constructed as proprietary software program.

Reflaunt and its rivals like Trove within the US run their very own fulfilment warehouses from which to function resale, or associate with small, specialised logistics corporations similar to Tersus Options, a Colorado-based textile cleansing facility that has discovered one other area of interest in on-line resale in recent times.

With DHL within the combine, nonetheless, Reflaunt’s reselling service can now be rolled out on a wide-scale international foundation, although its integration with Reflaunt will start in Europe.

“We’ve the capabilities and the setup to deliver [e-commerce] operations all below one roof,” mentioned Stephanie Crespin, founding father of Reflaunt. “We are able to now roll out resale wherever, all over the place, and really shortly.”

A number of synergies between common fulfilment and resale fulfilment might be realised below the partnership. For instance, when a web based buy is returned, the product often bounces round in fulfilment purgatory earlier than it finds its approach again to a model’s major stock or offloaded to liquidators. With Reflaunt in DHL’s warehouses, it means returns might be straight funnelled towards resale channels, permitting manufacturers to monetise merchandise that might in any other case be written off as a loss.

“Reflaunt is bridging the disconnect between secondhand and new [retail] by partnering with somebody who can now do each,” Karin Dillie, a style resale veteran and former government at Recurate and The RealReal.

The transfer additionally alerts the additional legitimisation of on-line style resale, which has seen a gentle trickle of latest manufacturers launching their very own secondhand ventures previously three years. There are about 160 manufacturers with their very own resale retailers, in keeping with ThredUP’s month-to-month Recommerce report that tracks motion within the class, up from simply 9 in 2020.

“All of this additionally in the end creates a resale channel that appears like conventional e-commerce at a worthwhile scale,” mentioned Gayle Tait, chief government at Trove, which not too long ago introduced Carhartt and outside model Cotopaxi as new model companions.