Resale is Gaining Ground: Luxury Brands Are Split on How to Respond

Pre-owned luxury is gaining ground fast. Some forecasts putting the secondary market at up to $360 billion by 2030. Resale is expanding at roughly three times the rate of first-hand fashion and luxury. The read between the lines here is that resale has shifted from purely complementing primary-market purchases to competing with them – especially among Gen Z and millennials, who cut 2024 spending on new luxury goods by 7 percent and 2 percent, respectively, as high prices and a softer economy push shoppers toward bargains. 

Resale has shifted from complementing the primary market to competing with it. As a result, luxury brands are being forced to decide not whether resale matters, but how much control they are willing (or able) to exert over it.

Some, like Chanel, are using litigation to refine the rules of secondary-market engagement. Others, most notably Rolex, have built certified-pre-owned pathways to bring resale under formal brand oversight. Still others, like Kering, are approaching resale indirectly, through capital and infrastructure rather than consumer-facing programs. The through-line is that resale is no longer a sideshow for luxury brands; it is a structural force they now have to manage, shape, or contain, and they are doing so in very different ways.

From Hard-to-Get Handbags to Swiss Watches

Category matters: in handbags, brands are tightening rules around how their icons move in resale; in watches, the emphasis shifts to formal certification and after-sales control. Three snapshots illustrate the split – Chanel’s rule-setting, Hermès’ counterfeit-first posture, and Rolex’s certified-pre-owned model.

> Chanel’s rule-setting: Long active in resale-adjacent disputes, Chanel has signaled that it intends to define the rules of the secondary market for goods bearing its trademarks. Through global litigation, the house has targeted not only counterfeits, but also unauthorized authentication claims, allegedly misleading marketing, and uses of Chanel IP that imply affiliation. The message to platforms and independent sellers is direct: resale itself is lawful, but appropriating Chanel’s quality signals or blurring who stands behind authenticity is not.

At the same time, Chanel is policing the conditions of third-party sales as a brand-protection layer. In pleadings and demand letters, the house argues that certain secondary-market handling creates “material differences” that confuse consumers – think refurbished items with non-OEM parts, removed or replaced serials, altered hardware, or “spa” treatments outside Chanel’s network – and even presentation issues (non-authentic packaging, missing dust bags, inconsistent grading, or photography and display that overstate condition). 

The effect is norm-setting: a legal strategy that shapes how resale platforms describe, guarantee, and visually present Chanel goods, well beyond the confines of any single case.

> Hermès’ narrower posture: Where Chanel seeks to shape resale behavior, Hermès has chosen restraint. Hermès’ resale qualms are narrower, with the company appearing to be less preoccupied with recommerce than with other brand risks. In fact, Hermès’ public comments suggest that it is primarily concerned with the flipping of brand-new bags. On a Q2 2025 earnings call, in August CEO Axel Dumas noted that “false customers” sometimes buy its hard-to-get bags purely to resell them, “preventing us from serving our real customers.” In other words, the immediate secondary-market threat is new-bag arbitrage, not the existence of a functioning pre-owned ecosystem that can actually validate desirability by demonstrating robust residual values.

Sources for TFL – and the company’s legal actions to date – indicate that its internal priority stack places anti-counterfeiting well above policing legitimate secondary listings. The logic tracks: counterfeits erode trademark distinctiveness, undermine quality assurances, and crucially confuse consumers from a provenance point of view in ways that can damage the brand’s hard-won aura of quality and scarcity. 

In practice, that means enforcement centered on classic anti-counterfeit tools and supply-chain controls, while resale is policed selectively for signs of new-bag arbitrage or misrepresentation rather than treated as a category to suppress.

> Rolex’s CPO Program: Rolex occupies a different position altogether. Its Certified Pre-Owned program is often described as an entry into resale, but it is better understood as an extension of after-sales control. CPO watches are sourced through authorized dealers, serviced within Rolex’s network, and sold with a new two-year Rolex warranty, keeping provenance, condition, and authentication firmly within the brand’s orbit.

What Rolex is not doing matters as much as what it is. The program does not democratize access, compete with dealers, or attempt to absorb the broader secondary market. Pricing is set by participating authorized dealers, not by Rolex, and the brand’s direct revenue comes from service and administrative fees rather than resale margins. The objective is not liquidity or volume, but authority: ensuring that when a Rolex changes hands, the brand (not a marketplace) remains the ultimate arbiter of authenticity, servicing, and long-term care.

> Kering’s Capital-First Bet: If Chanel litigates and Rolex certifies, Kering invests. Rather than looking to enforcing rules or building consumer-facing resale programs, Kering has approached re-commerce as market infrastructure. In March 2021, the group led a $216 million funding round in French luxury resale platform Vestiaire Collective, pushing the company to unicorn status after a year of rapid growth. Around the same time, Groupe Artemis, Kering’s parent, invested in sneaker resale platform GOAT.

The strategy is intentionally arm’s length. There is no group-wide CPO program, no unified authentication regime imposed on platforms, and no effort to funnel resale customers back into first-hand retail. Instead, Kering gains insight, influence, and optionality as resale platforms professionalize and consolidate. It is a portfolio approach: participating in resale’s growth and governance without entangling individual maisons in the operational, aesthetic, or brand risks of running resale themselves.

Structural Aspects of the Resale Approaches

The different approaches to resale are not philosophical so much as structural. Leather-goods houses face risks stemming from the manufacture and sale of counterfeits, as well as how genuine items are marketed and handled in resale. Because luxury handbags tend to lean on visible, easy-to-copy cues (logos, hardware, etc.) and lack the hard identifiers common in watches/jewelry, incremental variations to staple products over time can create knowledge gaps that make fakes and misleading listings more difficult to detect by consumers and authenticators, alike.

Meanwhile, a watchmaker like Rolex sells engineered longevity; it can industrialize refurbishment and verification, making CPO a natural extension of after-sales. Still yet, brands with extremely tight allocation and waitlists may judge robust third-party resale as proof of cultural heat, as long as they – not marketplaces – define authenticity and servicing norms. 

Ultimately, luxury’s stance is mixed because the incentives are. For some, resale is a reputational minefield best managed through enforcement; for others, it is a trust asset worth curating directly.

What Comes Next

Expect more serialization and digital product passports to tighten provenance; more quiet data-sharing between brands and platforms to inform buy plans and archive reissues; and more targeted lawsuits when marketplaces stray into improper authentication or implied affiliation. Don’t expect most fashion houses to operate resale at scale: intake, triage, and refurbishment are operationally messy and aesthetically off-brand for flagships. Instead, the center path is crystallizing: prosecute fakes relentlessly, set guardrails for how the brand is represented on secondary channels, and – where product architecture allows – offer a high-trust CPO or trade-in loop that protects the story sold at full price.

The winners here will be the brands that keep control of authenticity and narrative – without ceding pricing power to the gravitational pull of the secondhand market.