Pre-owned luxury is “gaining ground fast,” with 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.
The rising dollar figures and changing consumer sentiment are forcing luxury brands to choose a strategy for how to handle the resale market. Some, like Chanel, are litigating to refine the rules of secondary-market engagement; others, notably Rolex, are building certified-pre-owned pathways to police provenance. The result: a fragmented playbook.
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 acceptable secondary-market contours for goods bearing its trademarks. Its global litigation – targeting not only counterfeits but also unauthorized authentication claims, allegedly misleading marketing, and uses of Chanel IP that imply affiliation – does more than address infringement; it sets norms. The message to platforms and unaffiliated sellers is clear: you may sell lawfully acquired goods, but you may not co-opt Chanel’s indicia of quality control or blur who stands behind authenticity.
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).
By demanding consistency in both substance and presentation, Chanel frames quality control as the entire point-of-sale experience, not just the object itself. Grounded in trademark law’s quality-control and material-differences doctrines – and buttressed by selective-distribution principles – this approach enables Chanel to challenge not just counterfeits or false ads, but also the “how” of resale (refurbishment, presentation, and claims made at the point of sale).
In short: Chanel uses trademark and unfair-competition claims to police authenticity assertions, implied affiliation, and misleading marketing – shaping industry-wide standards for resale descriptions and guarantees given the closely-watched nature of the cases and their outcomes.
> Hermès’ narrower posture: 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: In yet another approach, Rolex has taken a hands-on path to resale via its Certified Pre-Owned program – an exercise in brand maintenance and consumer trust-building rather than a move into resale dealing. CPO watches are sourced by authorized dealers, pass through Rolex’s service process, and come with a new two-year Rolex warranty.
Not an absolute play for control or cash, pricing for CPO watches is set by the participating authorized dealers, not by Rolex, and Rolex’s direct take comes from service and administration fees paid by ADs on each CPO unit.
The value of the CPO venture is its ability to give Rolex a firm hand in a part of the market that used to sit outside its control. It enables Rolex to police provenance and condition at scale – reducing risks from adulterated parts, unauthorized servicing, and questionable grading – while keeping the maison, not the marketplace, as the ultimate arbiter of authenticity and aftercare.
>> 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 aftersales. 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.
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