Day 11: How fast fashion is harming the resale market

6/10/2024

Day 11: How fast fashion is harming the resale market

One thing I noticed when I was putting together my Shein capsule to wear for the next three months was that it’s usually cheaper to buy Shein items new — especially when you buy lots of them — than via resale sites.

When I decided to wear a small selection of Shein clothes for three months, to document how they stand up to daily wear, I initially planned to make up the capsule mainly of pre-owned clothes.

What I didn’t want was for this to become an excuse to buy a whole new wardrobe under the guise of ‘research’.

So as not to be part of the problem — namely buying huge amounts of new clothes I didn’t need — I decided to source most of the items among the thousands of worn once or never worn Shein clothes I’d seen on resale sites. I started with eBay, my resale site of choice, but quickly realised there were much bigger pickings to be had on Vinted, which like Shein is hugely popular among Gen Z.

Easier said than done

I’d always thought I would enjoy buying a whole new wardrobe from scratch, but in fact it was difficult, mainly because of having to mentally juggle all the different options; ‘if I buy the green jacket, it won’t go with the pink trousers so I’ll have nothing to wear the grey jumper with and that means I need to change that and also swap out the blue scarf for an orange one … On top of that, I was out of area for some of the courier companies, so things I’d selected suddenly turned out to be unavailable.

After a few days of adding things to favourites, trying to figure out outfits and finally clicking ‘buy it now’, I sat back and waited for my parcels to arrive.

But over the next week I received email after email telling me that my Vinted purchases had been cancelled and the money returned to my account.

Some parcels did arrive. By the end of the week I had two jackets, one pair of wet look leggings, a cropped sweatshirt bearing the slogan “Carte blanche Paris”, a scarf and a necklace (which my daughter immediately appropriated and was wearing to school every day).

Not as expected

However, these raised more questions than answers.

The jacket listed on Vinted under ‘raincoats’ clearly had no water resistant properties at all. But was this how it had been labelled on Shein, or had the seller decided it looked like a raincoat and tagged it accordingly?

Another jacket — impulse bought because it had an aviator vibe that made me think of the early female aviators from the 1930s — was missing all but two of its buttons. Had it really only been worn twice as the seller (who hadn’t mentioned the button loss) claimed? Was it fair to blame Shein’s construction or was this a shady secondhand seller?

Similarly, the wet look leggings, allegedly never worn, had a rough patch on the back of one thigh as if they had been dragged over a rough surface. Had the previous owner received them like this from Shein or were they pulling a fast one?

Fair experiment

I was doing the experiment, to be frank, with the expectation the pieces would fall apart after a few wears and washes. I would document this, and in doing so raise awareness about the huge amount of waste associated with fast fashion.

But I had to start fair.

I was already planning to buy underwear new, and after a look at the nightwear options online, a nightie or pair of pyjamas too — I couldn’t face putting on pyjama bottoms that had been up someone’s sweaty bum all night.

When it became clear that I wouldn’t really know whether the ‘unworn’ or ‘BNWT’ pieces really were as described (I’m still wondering how the buttons popped off that aviator jacket), I realised I’d have to buy at least some of the clothes new.

That’s when I decided I’d put together the most minimal capsule I possibly could…

The pricing

What shocked me when I did start buying directly off the Shein site was that the pieces cost barely more than buying very similar ones second hand. And once I took postage into account, it was often more economical to buy new.

That came as a surprise for me, as I usually shop on eBay (I’ve only recently moved onto Vinted too) for affordable items from my favourite brands, mostly higher-end high street stores — Hobbs, Jigsaw and Toast are some of the ones I often look for — as well as clothes in luxury fabrics like silk or cashmere, and the occasional designer piece like my DKNY sweatshirt and Paige jeans.

I’ve bought Hobbs jackets for £20 rather than £120, a Jigsaw jumpsuit for £25 rather than £180 and Paige jeans, which retail at around £100, for £14. Add onto that a few pounds for postage and packaging and it’s still a real bargain. IRL, I’ve picked up a DKNY t-shirt for just £2 from a charity shop and cashmere jumpers for as low as £4.

That’s obviously massively below the retail price for new garments, which is a great incentive to buy secondhand. It also means keeping those clothes in use and out of landfill/incinerators/dumping in developing countries at least for a few more years.

But when it comes to a retailer as cheap as Shein, the maths breaks down.

Doing the maths

In my first attempt at getting a mostly thrifted capsule, I was only paying somewhere between £1 and £5 for any of the clothes. But add in the postage, that came to another £3-4. A typical item probably cost at least £6 including postage.

New on Shein, with the exception of the coat and the cardigan, most things were around £5. So given that the postage was free, it actually worked out cheaper. Shein encourages large orders with free postage above a certain threshold (as low as £9.99 for one order), and clothes that discount automatically when they are part of an order over a certain value.

On top of that, there was the assurance that everything would be brand new, and I’d be able to return the clothes if they didn’t work for me (which of course you can’t do with individual sellers online).

That reminded me of a summer when I was on the hunt for a pair of white jeans, and ended up ordering several on eBay. One pair was too small; one pair was too big in the hips; the third pair fitted but the shape wasn’t fashionable… I still want a pair of white jeans.

Market breakdown?

I’m not the only one to have spotted how fast fashion distorts the second hand market. One BBC article reveals that although second-hand fashion has gone from a niche to a mainstream choice over the last decade, it’s not actually profitable. This goes all the way from small local thrift shops to major online retailers specialising in second-hand clothing, both of which struggle to turn a profit.

This stems from an imbalance in supply and demand, as well as the costs of processing used clothes for resale. At the heart of the issue lies the economics of fast fashion. “With the rise of ultra-fast, ultra-cheap fashion brands, the volume of clothing produced and shipped globally continues to explode, and consumers are offloading more of it after just a few wears,” says the article.

A recent Telegraph article points to the high cost of fast fashion in charity shops compared to from the original retailers. At an east London charity shop, the author found a “ravaged Primark fleece” on sale for £10.50; at Primark a brand new and almost identical fleece cost only £2.50. The author also found in general that items from both high street fast fashion brands and their ultra-fast online competitors “overflowed” at charity shops.

90 days of Shein

Today’s outfit includes one of the thrifted pieces I picked for my tiny capsule of Shein clothing, the trench coat.