After Viral ‘Wirkin,’ Walmart Inks Partnership With Luxury Reseller Rebag

Walmart is over the dupe.

Starting Thursday, the supermarket chain will begin selling an assortment of secondhand luxury handbags, watches and fine jewellery through a partnership with Rebag, an online resale platform.

Brands in the offering include Hermès, Goyard, Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Dior, which will be available to purchase on Walmart’s online marketplace. In September, the big box retailer launched a dedicated resale vertical on its marketplace called Resold at Walmart, where brands and third-party sellers are able to list a vast range of preowned or restored items from Swiss watches to laptops. In September, Walmart announced a similar partnership with sneaker resale company Stockx, in which sneakers sold by Stockx will be available for purchase on Walmart.com

Walmart made headlines earlier this month after a barrage of TikTok videos called attention to a $78 handbag sold by third-party merchants that imitated the style of an Hermès Birkin. These listings have since been removed, but after all colours and size options were sold out.

“One of the things that we love about pre-owned luxury is the accessibility of the price point for these coveted brands and also its alignment with Walmart’s initiatives around sustainability,” said Michael Mosser, vice president of Marketplace, Walmart US.

Although Walmart has offered secondhand fashion pieces through third-party listings for a number of years — including Birkins that sellers claim to be authentic — its partnership with Rebag will create a destination for shoppers to discover from the homepage of Walmart.com. Rebag will contribute tens of thousands of product options to Walmart’s fashion resale selection, a significant increase to existing volume, the company said.

“We’re launching a new resale luxury experience on the platform which will make it super easy and inspirational for fashion enthusiasts to come and shop across these brands,” Mosser said.

In recent months, Walmart has observed an uptick in interest for pre-owned luxury fashion on its website, he added, in part driven by a new cohort of affluent customers that contributed to Walmart’s sales growth. “Households earning more than $100,000 made up 75 percent of our share gains,” CEO Doug McMillon told analysts in November.

For Rebag, Walmart’s marketplace represents an opportunity to reach a whole new set of customers — including suburban or rural shoppers who may not be aware of the swarm of online resale options that have emerged in recent years. According to Walmart, 145 million shoppers visit its stores and website every week. Rebag, founded in 2014 by former investment banker Charles Gorra, sources its inventory by directly purchasing pieces from individual sellers.

“If you look at our customer base after 10 years of of marketing, we are reasonably well-known in the [New York] tri-state area, in Florida and in some areas of California, but I think we have a lot of work to do to penetrate other geographies in the US and certainly the Walmart partnership should enable some of that,” Gorra said.

As of last year, Rebag items can also be purchased at select Bloomingdale’s locations and on the department store’s website; Gorra predicts more department stores and other retailers to embrace resale in the “short to medium term.”

Walmart’s push into luxury resale comes at the heels of its multi-year investment in transforming its fashion offering, revamping the fashion sales floor within stores and modernising private labels. Last fashion week, it hosted a pop-up in New York City for the two private labels designed by Brandon Maxwell, Scoop and Free Assembly.

“Over the years, we had a really strong market share in categories like toys, bicycles, but we had a lower market share in a lot of fashion categories,” McMillon said in the November earnings call. “But in an omni world, we have an opportunity with brands, we have an opportunity with presentation to increase the amount of market share we have in some of those categories.”