Until recently, fashion resale was mostly about potential: sites like The RealReal and Thredup reported quarter after quarter of explosive growth, but for most secondhand players, profits proved elusive. Investors who snapped up shares in newly public marketplaces were souring on the sector.
Etsy’s $1.6 billion, all-cash acquisition of Depop should silence those doubts, at least for a while. The deal represents a major bet by one of e-commerce’s giants that the resale market’s dramatic rise has only gotten started. It also speaks to the growing spending power of Gen-Z; Depop has one of the youngest-skewing customer bases in the secondhand fashion market.