Secondhand business for Vietnamese brands: buy back your own

Picture an evening in late October. An office worker is clearing out her wardrobe before Tet, the Lunar New Year, when Vietnamese households tidy up and shop. She pulls out a leather bag from a local brand, bought two years ago. It still looks good; she is just tired of it. She takes three photos and posts them in a Facebook "pass đồ" group (a community for passing on used items). Ten minutes later someone messages: "Is it authentic? Do you still have the invoice?" They haggle, settle on a price, and book a motorbike courier. The whole sale happens without the brand that made the bag knowing anything about it: not who just bought its product, and not what the seller plans to buy next with the money.

This article looks at secondhand from the brand's side. At 126Insights, we see a used item as the second life of the product itself. If the brand doesn't step in, 2hand marketplaces and Facebook groups will keep that customer and that data. For Vietnamese local brands running a secondhand business, the first goal is to bring customers back to the store with a voucher. Revenue from reselling used items is something to count later.

US secondhand at $246.7 billion: reading the number correctly

On 22 October 2026, the used-goods marketplace OfferUp published its 2026 recommerce report (recommerce means reselling pre-owned goods). According to OfferUp's release on PR Newswire, the US secondhand market is estimated at $246.7 billion in 2026, up 7.9% from 2025, and will reach $307.7 billion by 2030. According to Chain Store Age, the survey was run by Pollfish with 1,500 US adults in August 2026, while GlobalData modeled the market size. Of the people surveyed, 90% bought secondhand in the past 12 months and 51% sold used items. Secondhand now accounts for 7.5% of all US retail spending.

Two things to keep in mind before you take this number into a meeting. First, the figures are self-published by a company, and OfferUp benefits when the secondhand market looks like it is growing. Second, $246.7 billion is the total across all categories: per OfferUp, about 75% of US secondhand spending falls outside clothing, covering furniture, electronics, home improvement, sporting goods and cars.

If you are in fashion, a closer figure comes from the 2026 resale report by ThredUp and GlobalData: global secondhand apparel will reach $393 billion by 2030, about 10% of all clothing spending, growing roughly 9% a year from 2025 to 2030, twice as fast as the overall clothing market. ThredUp is both a resale marketplace and a vendor that runs resale programs for brands, so this number deserves the same caution.

Do people buy secondhand to save money or to get better things?

Both. According to OfferUp, 81% of US buyers say secondhand lets them get what they want without paying full price. Among Gen Z, 41% buy secondhand to get higher-quality or premium products than they could otherwise afford. Chain Store Age quotes OfferUp CEO Todd Dunlap saying secondhand helps people "pay less for what they need, access things that might otherwise be out of reach."

Money is still a big reason. Chain Store Age headlines its story with the point that the secondhand market is growing while consumers worry about the economy. And in Chain Store Age's coverage of OfferUp's 2025 report, 79% of respondents then said they bought secondhand to save money.

For a product person, putting the two together points to something worth noticing: many buyers of your used item like your product but don't want to, or can't yet, pay the new price. They are future customers standing at the door. The question is whether they stand at your door or in front of a Facebook group.

Photo by Artur Voznenko on Unsplash

How a brand-run resale model works

A brand-owned resale model comes down to a few steps: a customer brings in an old product from the brand and receives store credit; the brand inspects and cleans it; items that pass go on the shelf in a "pre-loved" section on the website or in the store.

Three facts suggest brands have an edge when they run it themselves:

• Supply. According to WWD's summary of ThredUp's report, the industry's bottleneck is the supply of used goods, since buyers already exist. A brand has a list of past customers, so it knows who is holding its products.
• Trust. According to OfferUp, among secondhand buyers who had received a shipped item, 41% got something different from the description. A brand can confirm that its own goods are genuine. The promise after the sale is part of the product too, as our piece on the after-sales promise as a product argued; with used goods, a guarantee of authenticity carries even more weight.
• Sales channel. Also per WWD's summary of the report, nearly half of the time shoppers find a secondhand item, it happens on social media and creator channels. Vietnamese local brands already sell through fanpages and livestreams.

The market is also no longer wide open. In the release on ThredUp's 2026 resale report, GlobalData's Neil Saunders said the industry is "entering a more competitive, structurally complex phase." Late entrants need an edge of their own, and for a brand, that edge is the right to vouch for authenticity.

There is one more reason. According to Retail Brew, ThredUp's report argues that secondhand is taking a measurable share from new retail. The same article notes that resale service companies such as Treet and Archive used to tell brands the opposite. Remember that ThredUp sells resale services to brands. Even so, if used goods do take some sales, better that the money flows through the brand's own store, along with customer data. It is also why 126Insights wrote about the sales funnel: when customers and data sit on someone else's channel, the rules are someone else's too.

Photo by Kelvin Zyteng on Unsplash

Does a secondhand business suit Vietnamese local brands?

In 126Insights' view, it suits them because many young Vietnamese are already used to "đồ si" and 2hand (thrift and secondhand): browsing thrift markets, hunting through pass-đồ groups, watching livestreams selling used clothes. The brand only has to give them a more trustworthy place to buy.

It doesn't suit them in three ways. Cheap fast fashion resells for very little, sometimes not enough to cover the cost of washing, photographing and listing. Cleaning and inspecting each item is expensive. And some customers still feel uneasy using something someone else has used.

So a product team should answer one question before opening a pre-loved section: is my product still worth reselling after two years of use? Vietnamese elders say "của bền tại người," roughly "things last because of the person who cares for them," but in a resale program, durability has to be built in at the stage of choosing fabric, choosing leather and sewing the seams. If the answer is no, a pre-loved section will expose exactly that weakness in front of customers.

The model fits durable, high-value categories better: bags, shoes, outdoor gear, children's items. Children's items have their own advantage: kids grow fast, and clothes often get too small before they wear out. For low-priced goods, a more sensible approach is to take items back for store credit only, or to partner with an existing 2hand shop and let them handle the selling.

Photo by Ariane Frei on Unsplash

Piloting buyback for store credit before Tet: where to start

Year-end is when people clean out wardrobes and shop for Tet, so it is a good time to test. Like cooking a small pot before opening a restaurant, don't build a whole resale system before you know whether customers will bring items in. The spirit is the same as our piece on selling before you build. Pick one of three approaches:

1. Open a pilot store that takes back the brand's old products in exchange for store credit with a short expiry date.
2. Open a pre-loved section on the website, or a separate livestream session for inspected used items.
3. Partner with an existing 2hand shop to take the brand's items on consignment, and let them handle cleaning and listing.

During the pilot, track three metrics:

• Voucher redemption rate: how many issued vouchers get used.
• New order value: how much customers spend beyond the face value of the voucher.
• Return rate: after using a voucher, whether customers buy again within a few months.

If these three numbers look good, secondhand is doing its job of pulling customers back. Revenue from the used item itself, at this stage, counts as a bonus.

One thing you can do this week: put your three best-selling products of 2024 on the meeting table and ask the team, if a customer brought them back today, how much store credit would we dare to pay to take them? The answer tells you whether your product is ready for a second life.