ThredUp users have a routine. They stuff a bag with the sweaters and jeans they never wear, mail it off and let the company do the heavy lifting. ThredUp receives the package and proceeds to photograph, price, and list everything, so the sellers can forget about it until they get money deposited in their bank account a few months later.
But for many sellers, there’s one thing they hold back—a pair of Manolo Blahniks, a Louis Vuitton purse—because it’s special and they don’t want to let it go for less than it’s worth. So they might opt to sell it on TheRealReal or Poshmark, where they have more control.
Starting today, they no longer need to. ThredUp is launching Direct Listings, an open-beta peer-to-peer marketplace that lets sellers post individual items at their own price, right next to the Clean Out bags that drove ThredUp’s business. For the first time, sellers can hand over items they don’t care about and personally list the ones they do within the same app.
Resale is on track to be a nearly $80 billion U.S. market by 2030, and after years of explosive growth, ThredUp’s founder and CEO, James Reinhart, sees a new phase looming. “What you’ll see over the next couple of years is consolidation,” he says. To win that phase, though, ThredUp has to serve a wide range of customer needs.
The resale market is sorted into two camps. There is the do-it-yourself, peer-to-peer platforms—eBay, mobile-first Poshmark, Gen-Z oriented Depop, plus luxury players like Vestiaire Collective. On the other side are managed marketplaces, where the company does the heavy lifting. This includes The RealReal, which caters to luxury sellers, and ThredUp itself, which sells more mass market brands.
ThredUp was always built for the seller who didn’t want to do too much work. But in focus groups with sellers, many were asking for more control over a handful of items—and the peer-to-peer model isn’t really built for them. “The casual seller who doesn’t want to spend every day managing their listings and responding to comments and price-optimizing gets crowded out of those marketplaces,” Reinhart says.
ThredUp evolves
From the start, ThredUp pitched itself as the easiest way to sell secondhand clothing. The company manages the entire selling process, using data to identify how much customers are most likely to pay for it. Many sellers want to be hands off, but ThredUp has been experimenting with new features that give sellers some control over the pricing of their items.
In 2025, it launched Premium Clean Out kits, where ThredUp set the price of the items but the seller could go in and manually change them if they wanted. The growth of these kits was exponential, Reinhart says. This gave the company the confidence to launch Direct Listings, a tool for selling a few prized pieces one at a time.
Crucially, it’s still aimed at the casual seller, not the professional reseller. The goal was “a lean-back type of product experience,” Reinhart says—list a few special items, while continuing to let ThredUp manage the majority of other items you want to sell.
In early tests, Direct Listings posted an average selling price of $60—more than double ThredUp’s managed-marketplace average. Sellers don’t pay a fee, versus the 10%–20% standard elsewhere. Nearly 18% of listings are priced above $100, with a 12% sell-through rate on those premium items. And the highest-spending cohort was Gen Z, at a $72 average, who have a few designer pieces to sell. “These tend to be younger people who’ve got more time than money,” Reinhart says.
Reinhart believes that customers are not interested in managing several different resale apps. So to survive in the crowded resale market, ThredUp must offer a wide range of options, from donation kits of low-priced items to single-item listings. “People are going to be looking for a one-stop shop, because people are generally lazy,” he says. “We want to be that one super app for selling.”
Ultimately, he believes this will drive ThredUp’s momentum. The company posted $81.7 million in first-quarter revenue, up nearly 15% year over year, with active buyers up 25%. It’s still running at a loss—$6.5 million for the quarter—as it invests in automated distribution centers, but management has guided to full-year revenue of roughly $351 million–$356 million. Reinhart believes that resale will only continue to grow.
“Every successive generation of young people is adopting resale at higher rates,” he says. “Once people start shopping secondhand, they don’t stop.”
