How Croissant is trying to bring more retailers into the resale space

The business isn’t a resale platform, per se. Instead, Croissant users can go to the websites of over 150 retailers or brands and see a guaranteed resale value price that they would recoup if they bought the product new and then resold it to Croissant sometime later.

“We describe ourselves as the first shopping tool that provides guaranteed resale values at the point of sale and beyond,” said co-founder and CEO John Howard. He joined this week’s Modern Retail Podcast and spoke about how it’s growing its offerings and reaching new customers.

Croissant works in a few ways. It works directly with retailers, in which, on their e-commerce listings, they publish both the retail price as well as the guaranteed buyback price. Croissant also has an app and browser extension that automatically provides buyback values for products that aren’t within the company’s existing retail partners.

The idea, Howard said, is that “it’s not just the out of pocket money that you’re spending up front that should be as part of your purchase consideration.” Instead, “a lot of what we buy is a value-retaining asset that has ongoing value after you purchase it.” In essence, Croissant is letting shoppers know that they could probably make some money back on a higher-ticket item.

According to Howard, conversion rates go up when shoppers see an item’s estimated resale value. But, for now, the focus is on getting more people onto the Croissant platform. That involves marketing, including on new channels like Substack, to make sure people know about the program.

“We’re benefiting consumers,” Howard said. “And we’re benefiting the resale ecosystem, writ large.”

Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been lightly edited for clarity.

How Croissant works
“We describe ourselves as the first shopping tool that provides guaranteed resale values at the point of sale and beyond. So our product that we’re delivering are these guaranteed resale values. We call them guaranteed buybacks for shorthand … Guaranteed buybacks is sort of our moniker for the guaranteed resale values we provide. And what we’ve done is: We’ve taken this big idea that guaranteed resale values change the way that people think about shopping and selling, and we’ve built a whole product suite and an ecosystem around that idea.”

Trying to forecast resale value in the future
“At the very core of this is a very interesting data science problem, which is: How do you try to project trends and seasonality and fluctuations in resale price out into the future? That is an ever-evolving, ever-shifting target. But the basic way that you do it is we’re constantly scanning these secondhand sites, and we’re pulling down data on everything that’s listed — millions of data points across all the existing secondhand marketplaces and consignment ecosystems. And we’re able to see listing prices, as well as, in many cases, sold prices. And we’re pulling that data into a big data lake, as we call it. And then we’re using that data to inform the pricing that we deliver — usually against pretty basic parameters like brand and category, but then also more specific parameters around how seasonal that item might be or the materials that went into making it.”

Why Croissant isn’t competing with platforms like ThredUp
“We have built all the technology that supports the subsequent resale. This is a really cool distinction because it gives you a sense [of] how we’re resale-adjacent and not really a resale player in many ways. You can’t go to Croissant.com and shop for used inventory today. We go and resell through the existing marketplaces and consignment options that are already out there. So we looked at this [and] we said, there are decades of investment in managing these complex businesses. Those folks are doing that a lot better than us — think your Poshmarks and your Depops and your ThredUps and the list goes on. Let’s leverage what they already have built to move this inventory on and not build that ourselves. We’re going to focus on everything upstream and all the value that we can create for our retail partners and all of the delight that we can create for our users … So what we then do is we built a couple of different software integrations, using a combination of third-party and our own software, to allow us to multi-list items and get them out to the relevant resale marketplaces where they’re going to sell best.”