Walk into any Target or Old Navy the second week of August and the back-to-school racks tell the same story every year: bins of jeans in every size, a wall of backpacks, a checkout line moving slower than it should. What's changed is what's happening around that store, not inside it. Resale apps, thrift chains and peer-to-peer marketplaces are pulling a growing share of that same shopping list away from first-run retail, and the numbers behind that shift are bigger than most families realize.
ThredUp's 14th annual Resale Report, released earlier this year, put the U.S. secondhand apparel market at $55.5 billion in 2025 — about 12% of the $458 billion Americans spent on clothing, footwear and accessories that year. The market grew 19% in 2025 alone, its strongest year since 2021, and it's outpacing new-clothing retail by roughly 3.6 times. None of that growth is evenly spread across age groups, either. Fifty-nine percent of consumers shopped secondhand apparel in 2025, up seven points in three years, and Gen Z and Millennials — the parents and older siblings doing a lot of the actual back-to-school shopping — are projected to drive 70% of the market's future growth.
Why back-to-school is where this shows up hardest
Kids' clothes are close to the ideal secondhand category, and it's worth saying plainly: buying a growing eight-year-old's jeans new every August is one of the more wasteful default habits a household can fall into. A pair of jeans worn for four months before an inevitable growth spurt still has years of life left in it for the next kid, and platforms like ThredUp, Poshmark and Kidizen have built entire categories specifically around that turnover — lightly-worn kids' basics that get resold two or three times before they're actually worn out. The same logic applies less obviously to backpacks, which absorb one school year of abuse and then usually get replaced regardless of condition because the zippers or the style feel dated, not because the bag failed.
Shopping behavior has shifted with the market, too. Nearly half of secondhand shoppers now discover their next find through social media, creators and influencer feeds rather than searching a marketplace app directly — a meaningful change from even three years ago, when resale still meant scrolling a dedicated app with a specific item in mind. Gen Z buyers in particular have moved from bulk "haul" shopping toward targeted searches for specific brands and pieces, which is the opposite of impulse buying and, frankly, a healthier pattern than what a lot of first-run retail is optimized to encourage.
Where to actually start this month
Start with the categories that turn over fastest and depreciate hardest when bought new: outerwear, backpacks, and shoes in a size you know your kid will outgrow within a year. A $90 winter coat bought secondhand for $25 on ThredUp or Poshmark isn't a downgrade — it's very often the same coat, one season older, at a quarter of the price. Save new-purchase budget for the items that actually take daily wear and where fit matters most, like sneakers and everyday pants, since those are harder to judge accurately from a resale listing's measurements alone.
Local consignment and thrift shops still beat apps on one thing apps can't replicate: trying an item on before you commit. Buy Nothing groups and local Facebook marketplace listings are worth checking before any paid resale app, especially for larger items like desks or bookshelves for a home study space — those move fast in late July and August specifically because other families are clearing out the same categories at the same time you are.
Don't assume secondhand always means cheaper, though. Vintage and specific in-demand brands on Poshmark or Depop can run close to or above retail if a piece has any collector value, so check a few comparable new-retail prices before assuming a resale listing is automatically the better deal. It usually is. It isn't always.
The other half of the equation: what happens to last year's clothes
Buying secondhand only closes half the loop. The clothes your kids already outgrew this summer are the supply side of the same market, and letting them sit in a bag in the garage doesn't help anyone. ThredUp, along with most local consignment shops, will take clean, gently-used kids' clothing on consignment or for a flat resale payout — smaller than what you'd get selling piece-by-piece on Poshmark, but far less time than photographing and listing two dozen individual items yourself. For anything too worn to resell, most H&M and Zara locations still run in-store textile take-back bins, though it's worth knowing that program mostly feeds textile recycling rather than resale, which is a lower-value outcome than a direct resale but still better than a landfill.
Trade clothes directly with another family if you can — a straightforward swap with a sibling's friend group or a neighborhood parents' chat skips the platform fees, the shipping boxes and the wait entirely, and it's the fastest way to offload a bag of size-8 clothes the same week you need size-10.
The back-to-school list isn't going away, and neither is the instinct to want everything new for the first day. But the $31 billion U.S. online resale market projected for 2026 — up from $26 billion in 2025 — didn't get that big because families were settling for less. It got that big because for a huge share of what's on that list, secondhand is simply the better find.
What's actually worth buying new
Buy new when it comes to underwear, socks, and anything that touches a child's mouth like water bottles or lunch containers — that's not a resale category worth pursuing, and no amount of savings makes it the right call. Buy new for shoes if your kid has any foot or gait issue a pediatrician has flagged, since fit precision matters more there than anywhere else on the list. Everything else — coats, backpacks, jeans, sweatshirts, school uniforms, even graphing calculators — has a healthy resale market and, in most cases, a better price-to-condition ratio than the store shelf.
Uniforms deserve a specific mention because they're one of the most wasteful categories in the entire back-to-school list. A polo shirt with a school crest ironed on gets worn maybe 90 times before a growth spurt retires it, and most schools now run some version of a Facebook group or a PTA-organized uniform swap specifically because so many families end up with a bag of barely-worn crested shirts by June. Check with the school office before buying a single new uniform piece — several districts run a formal swap table during back-to-school orientation, and it's usually free.
A realistic monthly savings number
A family with two school-age kids spending $600 to $800 on a full back-to-school wardrobe refresh can realistically cut that by $200 to $350 by sourcing coats, backpacks and last year's still-fitting basics through resale first and reserving new purchases for underwear, shoes and anything school-specific like gym uniforms. That's not a marginal discount — it's close to a third of the total bill, redirected from a landfill-bound fast-fashion cycle into a market that's already reselling the same item two or three more times after your family is done with it.