New Again: Adventures in Secondhand Shopping

Back in those bad old days, I, like every other compulsive shopper in the world, was at the mercy of brick-and-mortar stores, captive to their schedules, watching with my cute little tongue hanging out for January and July to arrive The endless days of tooling around department stores, begging a salesclerk to hide things until sale time arrived, were replaced by my new three favorite words: "Add to Cart." With the arrival of the internet, you could search the globe for Comme des Garçons coats and Balenciaga boots-Matches in London! Vestiaire Collective in France! Not only were this season's items available to all comers, but there were also sites like Yoox and the Outnet, where fashions from the recent past could be had at dramatically reduced prices As the poet William Butler Yeats epigraph goes, "In dreams begins responsibility" If the internet opened up endless opportunities for the buyer, what did it mean for luxury companies themselves? How can you entice this stylish consumer into a store when she can spend the evening clicking in her nightie and wake up the next morning with a pile of treasures from UPS at her doorstep? Every day is Christmas! Can a brick- and-mortar store, no matter how swanky, compete? And does the existence of so many venues, so many online sites featuring fancy labels, erode some of the specialness of these brands? Maybe the whole meaning of "Luxury" is shifting-if you're young and used to the fun of shopping online, the hushed corridors of a tony boutique can feel like a funeral parlor.

Not only is Gucci on to something, enticing shoppers back into a store by making it goofy and friendly, it has opened on a downtown street directly across from the RealReal shop "We love the brands! These are the most beautiful products in the world- they should be resold I try to sell everything with integrity" She says the light bulb went off in her entrepreneurial head when she was shopping some years ago with a persnickety girlfriend at a shop that had a small, beautifully curated consignment department.

She is a fierce proponent of this new shopping ecology: "If Gucci had no resale value, would you buy it at full retail? We are a little baby company, but we are not going away." . Source