Secondhand Gifts Go Mainstream: 62% of Americans to Buy Resale This Holiday Season

Sixty-two percent of Americans plan to buy at least one secondhand item this holiday season, according to a GlobalData survey of more than 2,000 U.S. adults commissioned by ThredUp. More than 70% say they're open to giving or receiving a preowned gift. The old taboo — never give someone a used present — is quietly collapsing.

The numbers behind the shift

ThredUp, which bills itself as the world's largest online thrift store, spent most of its 17-year history watching holiday sales dip while traditional retailers banked their profits. "We were the inverse of traditional retail," says Alon Rotem, ThredUp's chief strategy officer.

That pattern has flipped. Between 2023 and 2025, items ThredUp sold during the holiday season grew 37%, versus 22% growth for the full year. Holiday sales now outpace the rest of the company's calendar — a reversal that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

The survey adds texture. 55% of Americans would rather unwrap a one-of-a-kind vintage or hard-to-find secondhand item in excellent condition than a mass-produced brand-new one. That preference for scarcity over novelty is the signal retailers should watch.

What does this change for holiday retail?

It means stretched budgets are redirecting spend toward resale. Holiday spending rose 4.1% last year, according to the National Retail Federation, but shoppers say their money didn't stretch far enough. In ThredUp's survey, 38% skipped buying something for themselves, and 37% spent less on a gift than they'd hoped.

Even so, 84% expect to spend at least as much this year as last. Survey intentions can shift at the register, but younger shoppers are explicit about their strategy: 78% of millennials and 70% of Gen Z plan to buy at least one secondhand item this season. Their stated reasons are practical — lower cost, better quality for the money, a budget that goes further. Among respondents, 30% hope to buy gifts for more people, 29% said they could get the gift they actually wanted, and 20% could buy something for themselves.

Parties matter too. A third of Americans want something new to wear to holiday events, rising to about half of Gen Z. Last year, 16% skipped an event they wanted to attend because they lacked something to wear. Secondhand offers a practical fix: an outfit that's new to them, and that their friends haven't seen before.

How resale rebranded itself

The industry spent years engineering this acceptance. The language did heavy lifting: "used" and "thrifted" gave way to "vintage," "resale," and "preowned." Fifteen years ago, secondhand meant digging through crowded racks at the Salvation Army. Platforms like ThredUp and The RealReal now run websites that look like any fashion retailer's, with polished imagery and tissue-paper unboxing.

Discovery has improved too. Patagonia, Hanna Andersson, and Eileen Fisher operate their own resale sites, and ThredUp has invested heavily in AI tools that let shoppers upload a photo to find similar items or describe what they want in natural language.

Millennials drove the destigmatization; Gen Z and Gen Alpha never felt the taboo at all. "Buying secondhand used to be a virtue signal," Rotem says. "It's not anymore. It's just another way to shop."

The sustainability question

This raises a harder question for the broader sustainability movement. The first wave of eco-friendly brands, like Allbirds and Everlane, asked shoppers to pay a premium and struggled to scale that model. Sustainable companies now realize they need to offer value, better prices, and taste — not just an ethical backstory.

Rotem's answer is circularity plus policy. Young shoppers aren't motivated by environmental impact, he notes, but they treat clothes as assets they can resell — so they buy more deliberately and send less to landfill. The rest, he argues, must come from regulation: laws pushing manufacturers to design recyclable products, embed digital passports for traceability, and pay for the waste they create. "If we internalize the externality and make them financially responsible for it," he says, "they're going to produce less."

For now, holiday shoppers are doing the work whether they intend to or not. "If consumers don't have sustainability at the front of their mind, but they're behaving in circular ways," Rotem says, "we're halfway there." For retailers, the takeaway is starker: resale is no longer a niche counter-season — it's competing for the holiday dollar head-on.