‘Thrifting’ Extends to Holiday Shopping Too

A new kind of present is gaining acceptance this holiday season. More consumers are picking secondhand items to gift each other, finding it to be an environmentally and budget-friendly option.

Thrift stores that sell used clothes and goods are springing up online and on street corners. Goodwill Industries International, the nonprofit behind the familiar chain of thrift stores, is ramping up its online efforts. Fashion brands are developing their own resale offering to keep up with clothing-reseller sites such as Depop and Poshmark. Roughly 17% of gifts this holiday season will be a resold item, according to software firm Salesforce.

“Consumers are choosing resale first because of the incredible value, the unique merchandise, and the incredible sustainability benefit,” said Matt Kaness, chief executive of GoodwillFinds, the nonprofit’s online e-commerce platform run in partnership with Salesforce.

Secondhand clothes, once seen as frumpy and embarrassing, are now keenly sought out by the fashion conscious. A popular vintage aesthetic dovetails with consumer calls for goods that do less harm to the world. About 85% of American shoppers have bought or sold preowned items over the past year, nearly a third for the first time, according to online marketplace OfferUp’s Recommerce report. In apparel alone, some 10% of the global market will be secondhand by next year.

GoodwillFinds is the only major nonprofit player in resale.

GoodwillFinds’ online platform allows a smarter operation than the traditional bricks-and-mortar store, said Kaness, formerly an executive with retailers including Walmart and Urban Outfitters. The platform uses artificial intelligence and large data sets to more accurately price and categorise items, creating a much more efficient system, Kaness said.

“In a store, it’s a human looking at the item. They have paper sticker tickets for the price and they have to process such a volume that it is somewhat random,” he said. In contrast, the company’s online system uses computer vision to take a picture, identify the item, create a listing and price it.

Moving online is the logical choice for secondhand sellers, said 25-year-old Brooke Bowlin, who runs lifestyle blog Nuance Required. “Secondhand stores just can’t sell enough,” said Bowlin, who started her own thrift store in Siloam Springs, Ark. “By moving online and expanding the audience, there is an opportunity to re-home more clothes,” she said.

Major fashion brands are also increasingly recognising that secondhand is as much a necessity as it is an opportunity. The fashion industry is responsible for up to 8% of global emissions, relying on resource-intensive raw materials and fast-moving trends that have contributed large amounts of waste. Around 11.3 million tons of textile waste go to landfills in the U.S. every year, according to environmental organisation Earth.Org.

Outdoor-clothing retailer Patagonia established its Worn Wear platform in 2017, one of the first resale channels by a major brand.

As much as adapting to trends, Patagonia Worn Wear aims to change consumer behavior, said Asha Agrawal, managing director of the Patagonia venture fund that runs the platform.

“A lot of our messaging is around—‘you don’t need to buy something new,’” she said.

Worn Wear buys back used brand gear from consumers by paying higher prices than peer-to-peer apps or other marketplaces, Agrawal said. This strategy contributes to the bulk of the platform’s costs but also boosted its inventory fourfold this year alone, she said, adding Worn Wear has been profitable for the last two years.

Worn Wear is now integrated into the Patagonia brand. “You can now do your main shopping with Patagonia with our resale business in the U.S.,” she said. “That’s a huge evolution for us.”

Resale by brands and third parties is expected to outpace traditional thrift sales and donations in the U.S., rising to 60% of a $70 billion total by 2027 from 15% of the $20 billion secondhand market in 2017, according to online thrift store ThredUp’s recent resale report.

Other fashion players have their versions. Sweden’s Hennes & Mauritz launched H&M Pre-Loved in the U.S. this year, in partnership with ThredUp. Inditex-owned Zara has launched a preowned platform that offers repair services, customer-to-customer sales and donations of used garments in the U.K. and France, with plans for a U.S. rollout by 2025.

Resale remains an imperative for fashion brands as a way to control distribution and retain the trust of shoppers increasingly alert to the fate of their old clothes. However, scaling up resale generates a raft of operational challenges such as authentication, returns and ensuring that secondhand doesn’t look like an afterthought, said Anita Balchandani, fashion lead at consultant firm McKinsey & Co.

Unlike nonprofits, such as Goodwill, that get their inventory from donations and don’t have to be accountable to shareholders, retailers are struggling to make business sense of resales, Balchandani said.

“No one has proven the path to scaling this up profitably,” she said. “You almost have to create a whole new end-to-end supply chain…. The retailer who cracks that journey is going to make a real difference in this space.”

It’s go time for the highest-stakes mission at NASA in more than 50 years.

On April 1, the agency is set to launch four astronauts around the moon, the deepest human spaceflight since the final Apollo lunar landing in 1972.

The launch window for Artemis II , as the mission is called, opens at 6:24 p.m. ET.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration teams have been preparing the vehicles to depart from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on the planned roughly 10-day trip. Crew members have trained for years for this moment.

Reid Wiseman, the NASA astronaut serving as mission commander, said he doesn’t fear taking the voyage. A widower, he does worry at times about what he is putting his daughters through.

“I could have a very comfortable life for them,” Wiseman said in an interview last September.

“But I’m also a human, and I see the spirit in their eyes that is burning in my soul too. And so we’ve just got to never stop going.”

Wiseman’s crewmates on Artemis II are NASA’s Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

Photo: NASA’s Artemis II SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft being rolled out at night. Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo/Getty Images

What are the goals for Artemis II?

The biggest one: Safely fly the crew on vehicles that have never carried astronauts before.

The towering Space Launch System rocket has the job of lofting a vehicle called Orion into space and on its way to the moon.

Orion is designed to carry the crew around the moon and back. Myriad systems on the ship—life support, communications, navigation—will be tested with the astronauts on board.

SLS and Orion don’t have much flight experience. The vehicles last flew in 2022, when the agency completed its uncrewed Artemis I mission .

How is the mission expected to unfold?

Artemis II will begin when SLS takes off from a launchpad in Florida with Orion stacked on top of it.

The so-called upper stage of SLS will later separate from the main part of the rocket with Orion attached, and use its engine to set up the latter vehicle for a push to the moon.

After Orion separates from the upper stage, it will conduct what is called a translunar injection—the engine firing that commits Orion to soaring out to the moon. It will fly to the moon over the course of a few days and travel around its far side.

Orion will face a tough return home after speeding through space. As it hits Earth’s atmosphere, Orion will be flying at 25,000 miles an hour and face temperatures of 5,000 degrees as it slows down. The capsule is designed to land under parachutes in the Pacific Ocean, not far from San Diego.

Water photo: NASA’s Orion capsule after its splash-down in the Pacific Ocean in 2022 for the Artemis I mission. Mario Tama/Press Pool

Is it possible Artemis II will be delayed?

Yes.

For safety reasons, the agency won’t launch if certain tough weather conditions roll through the Cape Canaveral, Fla., area. Delays caused by technical problems are possible, too. NASA has other dates identified for the mission if it doesn’t begin April 1.

Who are the astronauts flying on Artemis II?

The crew will be led by Wiseman, a retired Navy pilot who completed military deployments before joining NASA’s astronaut corps. He traveled to the International Space Station in 2014.

Two other astronauts will represent NASA during the mission: Glover, an experienced Navy pilot, and Koch, who began her career as an electrical engineer for the agency and once spent a year at a research station in the South Pole. Both have traveled to the space station before.

Hansen is a military pilot who joined Canada’s astronaut corps in 2009. He will be making his first trip to space.

Koch’s participation in Artemis II will mark the first time a woman has flown beyond orbits near Earth. Glover and Hansen will be the first African-American and non-American astronauts, respectively, to do the same.

What will the astronauts do during the flight?

The astronauts will evaluate how Orion flies, practice emergency procedures and capture images of the far side of the moon for scientific and exploration purposes (they may become the first humans to see parts of the far side of the lunar surface). Health-tracking projects of the astronauts are designed to inform future missions.

Those efforts will play out in Orion’s crew module, which has about two minivans worth of living area.

On board, the astronauts will spend about 30 minutes a day exercising, using a device that allows them to do dead lifts, rowing and more. Sleep will come in eight-hour stretches in hammocks.

There is a custom-made warmer for meals, with beef brisket and veggie quiche on the menu.

Each astronaut is permitted two flavored beverages a day, including coffee. The crew will hold one hourlong shared meal each day.

The Universal Waste Management System—that’s the toilet—uses air flow to pull fluid and solid waste away into containers.

What happens after Artemis II?

Assuming it goes well, NASA will march on to Artemis III, scheduled for next year. During that operation, NASA plans to launch Orion with crew members on board and have the ship practice docking with lunar-lander vehicles that Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin have been developing. The rendezvous operations will occur relatively close to Earth.

NASA hopes that its contractors and the agency itself are ready to attempt one or more lunar landing missions in 2028. Many current and former spaceflight officials are skeptical that timeline is feasible.

‘Thrifting’ Extends to Holiday Shopping Too

Roughly 17% of gifts this holiday season will be a resold item, according to Salesforce data

The lunar flyby would be the deepest humans have traveled in space in decades.