Second Coming

IT WAS ABOUT three years ago, right in the midst of the pandemic, that Kimaya Banga opened her cupboard and began counting the number of designer handbags she owned. “I was overwhelmed,” the 32-year-old corporate banker in Mumbai says. “There were 52 of them. I thought I must do something about it.” So, Banga, who has been col­lecting handbags from leading fashion houses like Chanel, Louis Vuitton, and Dior ever since she got her first designer one at 18, did what she had anyway begun to do in smaller numbers for a few years now. She put up half of them for sale.

So, how many handbags does she own now? “I don’t count anymore,” she says. “I must have over 50 of them again.”

Banga may have begun acquiring luxury products like designer handbags and shoes from retail outlets, especially in her travels abroad, but she rarely ever buys them from stores anymore. For her, like for a growing number of Indian shoppers of such luxury goods, purchases come with an unusual provenance—a past owner.

“It is preowned. Who cares?” she says. “These are high-end handbags. So, they are obviously well-taken care of. Thier previ­ous owners probably used them a couple of times or so.” Banga, who now buys about one or two second-hand designer handbags every month, apart from shoes and accessories like belts and wallets, be­fore selling them once she tires of them so she can move on to her next purchase, points out that out of the 50 or so hand­bags in her wardrobe, just about seven or eight have been picked up first-hand. “You get bored very soon now,” she says. “Earlier trends changed every season or so. Now, it changes like every three months.”

The market for luxury goods has been growing rapidly in India. Considered to be one of the fastest growing markets in glob­al luxury today, a report by Euromonitor International estimates that the luxury market, which includes goods like high-end fashion products, apart from things like luxury cars and wines, is estimated to be worth about $8.5 billion by this year. Another report, by Bain & Co, claims this market will grow to be worth over $200 billion by 2030.

Parallel to this growth, has been an equally large growth in the until recently non-existent market of second-hand luxury products. There have been few at­tempts to gauge the depth of the second-hand luxury market in India. But accord­ing to a recent report by the International Market Analysis Research and Consult­ing Group, the second-hand luxury goods market in India reached $555 million last year. By 2028, the report estimates, this will be worth $1,060.8 million. People like Banga are scouring the internet, turning up at pop-up events and checking out the outlets and websites of what is called recommerce brands, looking to pick up high-end designer handbags, clothes, and accessories, sometimes in mint con­dition and sometimes with a bit of wear and tear, on the cheap. “The whole scene for preowned luxury has just exploded in India,” says Punit Anand, the Mumbai-based founder of Luxury Pop which sells second-hand luxury goods.

It should come as no surprise that there is value in second-hand luxury products, given how much they cost in the retail outlets. But in class-conscious societies like India, there has historically been an aversion to anything second-hand. You sell something from your wardrobe only if you fall on bad times, and, if you have the means, you never buy second-hand. And if you did buy something second-hand, you did it with great shame and guilt, and never told a soul where you had acquired the product from. But those who run re­sale businesses claim that when it comes to second-hand luxury products, an atti­tudinal change is occurring. “There was a big stigma about seven, eight years ago, but today, buying something preowned is getting completely mainstream,” says Anvita Mehra, whose business Confidential Couture, started in 2014, is among the oldest platforms that sell second-hand luxury goods. She points out that when she started the business, she called it Confidential Couture, to im­press upon buyers and sellers the idea that the entire exercise was being conducted in secrecy. Confidentiality today, while guar­anteed, however, is rarely sought. And Mehra was confident enough of this, she says, that she opened a physical outlet in Delhi, where buyers of second-hand goods brushed against each other all the time.

According to Ashri Jaiswal, the Bengaluru-based cofounder of Ziniosa, which sells and rents preowned luxury goods, it is the growth of HENRYs (high earners not rich yet), a growing demog­raphy of aspirational young profession­als with large disposable incomes in India who are fuelling this demand for second-hand luxury goods. “Millenni­als and Gen Z prefer to rent and re-wear rather than buy something new today,” she says. “They want to be seen on Insta­gram carrying designer handbags. They want to make a style statement,” she says. The relative affordability of second-hand products, and the need to be seen online carrying them, and preferably changing them frequently, is fuelling demand for these products. According to one buyer, you wear something, be seen on social media a few times with it, get the likes, and then sell it back and move on to the next purchase.

PRIYA (NAME CHANGED upon request), an HR professional in Bengaluru, recently bought herself a Louis Vuitton handbag for around ₹60,000 that she claims would cost her close to ₹1 lakh had she bought it first-hand. “You can’t even tell it has been used before,” she says. According to Priya, who began buying second-hand handbags and shoes during the pandemic, there is a unique pleasure that comes from rifling through these items to find something you like, that is absent when you pick up some­thing off the rack. “You have to really put your mind to the search,” she says. “And you find something really personal and rare sometimes, things that you can’t get in a store anymore,” she says. Banga, for instance, had been looking for a Louis Vuitton handbag that was made in collab­oration with the Japanese contemporary artist Takashi Murakami—a celebrated collaboration in the brand’s recent history that led to each style of the multi-coloured monogram line becoming a major status symbol in the 2000s before it was phased out in 2015—before she finally found it at a recommerce platform two months ago. “I was looking for it everywhere and I picked it up for ₹40,000,” she says.

Banga today is a regular at the second-hand market. She doesn’t just buy but also sells products she bought first-hand or earlier at a resale platform. “You buy something abroad, but you return and think it doesn’t work. So, you land up sell­ing it,” she says.

One of the reasons behind the boom in second-hand luxury is the way it has been rebranded. Second-hand is not second-hand anymore, with all the baggage that the word carries. Second-hand is now pre-owned, or, in the words of its millennial and Gen Z users, preloved. It is also being embraced by the world of high fashion in its attempt to become more environmen­tally sustainable. From Gucci to Rolex, Balenciaga to Coach, many luxury brands in several markets now, either take back their old products to be recycled or sell preowned goods at a reduced price. After years of pushing only the new, these brands are now beginning to embrace the old. Ce­lebrities are also catching on to this new buzzword, recycling their wardrobes for events and festivals, and giving the world of preowned a push by selling their personal collections. Earlier, the actress Katrina Kaif sold some 42 items of her personal collec­tion on the resale platform Saritoria.

“Celebrity closets when they become available are one of the most popular sections in the resale scene,” says Anand, whose Luxury Pop has sold items owned by the main cast of the popular Netflix show The Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives, and those owned by the model-designer Gabriella Demetriades, who recently merged her preowned luxury brand, VRTT Vintage, with Luxury Pop. Anand is currently working to bring the closet of the popular blogger and influ­encer Malini Agarwal, better known as Miss Malini, onto the platform.

One way to appreciate how big this market has become is by looking at the number of reseller businesses that have emerged in recent years. From Luxury Pop, Confidential Couture, renters and sellers of preowned goods Ziniosa, to the recent arrival of big international chains like Poshmark, a US-based company of second-hand goods, and many more, these recommerce platforms are drop­ping the latest and the rare, teasing audi­ences about upcoming collections, and transforming the market. According to them, while much of it is centred in the big metro cities, a lot of their orders now come from smaller towns and cities in re­mote corners of the country.

Even as the second-hand market for luxury goods rises, there has been a notice­able increase in the popularity of another new type of luxury—that of preowned sneakers. The sneaker market of course operates in a distinct way. There is the price at which a sneaker is sold by a brand in an outlet, and a price at which it gets re­sold, often much higher, once it goes out of stock at the retail level. Much anticipated sneakers like Nike’s Air Jordans or Adidas’ Yeezys (now discontinued after Adidas cancelled its partnership with its creator Kanye West, the rapper now known as Ye), which can disappear from shelves min­utes after their launch, are seen more as an alternative asset class than shoes that can be worn. And like other forms of col­lectibles, such as art, their worth rises or decreases over time, decided by a number of factors from the rarity of the sneaker, its condition, nostalgia associated with it, to the cultural capital attached to its creator. Driving the worth of the entire market is its audience, who often identi­fy themselves as sneakerheads, a culture that has been growing rapidly in India too.

According to the market and consumer data aggregator Statista, the sneaker market in India is forecast to generate a revenue of $2.63 billion this year.Prabal Baghla, a 25-year-old from Mum­bai, who owns an enviable collection that he estimates is somewhere between 100 and 200 sneakers, including Air Jordans and Yeezys, remembers walking into the house of his friend, the TV host Rannvijay Singha, to find a room dedicated to over 11,000 sneakers. “Some people have insane collections in India. A room full of sneakers, imagine that,” he says. Baghla, who often struggles to find sneakers of his size in In­dia (a UK size 12), partnered with a cousin, Param Minhas, and Singha, two years ago, to resell sneakers online. On this platform, called SoleSearch, sneakers are traded like commodities. Individual resellers and ven­dors put up their sneakers on this platform, and buyers can either buy them directly at the asking price or place a bid lower than that. The marketplace for sneakers in India, unlike in the West, has traditionally been cluttered and disorganised with many in­dividual resellers and vendors. But brands like SoleSearch are now transforming the scene. It opened an outlet in Mumbai about a month ago, and another one in Hyderabad is close to opening, apart from a mobile app that is being developed. So far, SoleSearch has sold two shoes between ₹7 lakh and ₹8 lakh, both Nike’s Air Force 1s. The most expensive shoe currently listed on its platform at ₹11.34 lakh is a metal­lic gold version of the celebrated Nike Air Force 1 made in collaboration with Louis Vuitton by the American designer Virgil Abloh.

It was somewhere around 2019 when Banga and her sister sold one of the most expensive possessions in their cup­board—a classic version of a Chanel bag. The two had bought it in 2010 and had now sold it for ₹2.5 lakh. “It was in mint condition and the value of a Chanel bag, because it is rare, always goes up,” she says. “Had we waited and sold today, we would have made a lot more.”

Does she regret it? “Not really,” she says. “We didn’t want a beige bag anymore. So, we used the money to buy something else,” she says.

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