Rhone debuts resale site built on customer returns

Rhone decided to launch ReRhone after seeing returns grow alongside the brand, said Bethany Evans, Rhone’s chief marketing officer. Rhone processes 5,000 returns a month, on average, although this can ebb and flow with the seasons. The majority of returns are new merchandise with tags, meaning Rhone can resell them, Evans said. But if items show light wear-and-tear, Rhone donates them. ReRhone allows Rhone to keep these products in circulation, recoup revenue and appeal to shoppers seeking out secondhand items.

“For us, it felt like, ‘We’re growing a lot. We have more returns than we used to. How do we responsibly manage those and do something that is more sustainable and environmentally friendly?'” asked Evans. “Resale is something we had been exploring for a while, and it felt like the right time.” Rhone declined to share revenue, but a spokesperson said the business has seen double-digit year-over-year growth.

Powering up ReRhone

Resale is booming as more shoppers look to reduce their environmental footprints and save money amid tariffs and higher inflation. In fact, ThredUp projects that the U.S. secondhand apparel market will grow to $74 billion by 2029. Brands are looking to take advantage of the hype, too. In launching a resale program, Rhone joins a growing list of companies including Béis, Filson and Lovevery.

At launch, ReRhone includes close to 400 items, all discounted from their original retail price. Customers can sort items by filters like category or size. An item’s condition affects its price; if something is “excellent,” it will cost more than if it were “very good” or “good.” To determine the items’ conditions — as well as clean and repair them — Rhone is working with Tersus Solutions, a longtime Archive partner.

Rhone and Archive expect ReRhone customers to be a mix of existing and new brand fans. Current customers could use ReRhone to find discontinued items or SKUs in a sold-out color, Evans said. In other cases, Rhone could appeal to people who want to try the brand at a lower price. Products on ReRhone currently range from $19-$274.

Ryan Rowe, co-founder and chief technology officer of Archive, believes Rhone is an ideal candidate for resale, considering its brand cachet. “The resale potential of a brand like Rhone is very strong, because they have a strong direct-to-consumer brand,” he told Modern Retail. “And they have an incredibly premium and long-lasting product.”

Rhone is promoting its new resale program on social media and in emails, primarily through education, Evans said. “Even though resale has gotten so much more prevalent, people have a lot of questions,” she said. “‘Where is this coming from?’ ‘How does it work?'” To help with this, Rhone is publishing FAQs on the ReRhone website. Rhone is also updating metadata for ReRhone products to increase their chances of showing up in AI engines like ChatGPT.

The high costs of returns

Returns are a growing challenge for retail companies, especially as people order the same items in multiple sizes or colors. The National Retail Federation and Happy Returns projected that about 15.8% of retailers’ online sales were returned in 2025, amounting to some $850 billion in merchandise.

Sometimes, brands may choose to donate — and thus write off — returns with defects like deodorant stains. But in doing so, they’re “basically losing all the upfront investment you’ve made into that item,” Allison Lee, founder of the resale platform Revive, told Modern Retail. On the other hand, if brands are willing to put in the money to clean and repair returns, that can be a good starting point for resale, Archive’s Rowe explained. “That stuff tends to be relatively recent and high-quality,” he said.

One challenge with selling a brand’s in-season returns, via resale, is that the same merchandise may still exist on the main site. “It can be too close to home,” Lee said, “because you’re selling this for full price, right next door.” It’s possible that doing so, she surmised, “could hurt your full-price sales” if customers default to the cheaper option. Both ReRhone and Rhone.com, for instance, sell the 7″ Men’s Commuter Short in Khaki in size 38 — the former for $49-$54 and the latter for $68.80.

Rowe, when asked about this, said that newer customers tend to start with resale and then “graduate on” to full-price merchandise. That said, Rowe added, “There are cases in which we [advise brands] to … withhold certain inventory — maybe because there’s a big sale on the main site, and we don’t want to compete with that. Or, it could be something like we have too much summer stuff, so let’s hold until next summer.”

Evans said Rhone is excited to launch ReRhone, as she used to work at The North Face and saw how its Renewed program took off. Rhone is still in a “learning process” with ReRhone and expects to be for some time, Evans said. “[We said,] ‘Let’s launch and learn and see what our community feedback is,'” she said.

“We didn’t want to bite off more than we could chew,” Evans added. “It’s more so the logistical and accounting nuances of, ‘Let’s make sure we have everything right before we do this.'” Even so, Rhone will evaluate the program’s progress to decide whether to branch out into other avenues, like peer-to-peer resale.