Zalando rides the second-hand wave with pop up store in Berlin

Zalando continues to expand offline and this time exploring the second-hand model. The European ecommerce giant has launched its new pop up store, Zircle, in the shopping mall Alexa, in Berlin, un which it will commercialize garments of its app Zalando Wardrobe.

The company explained in a press release that the goal of this pop up is to get to know how the second-hand market works in the offline channel, so the brands get to know what to offer its consumers. Zalando emphasizes that its main channel is still online, but that in certain occasions they use both channels for their activities.

Zalando Wardrobe is a mobile app that the company started running last year and that allows consumers to sell their secondhand items on exchange for a bonus for the platform. For now, the app is only available in Germany.  

With this initiative, Zalando bets for the secondhand model, a phenomenon that started to grow, especially in the United States. This summer, Macy’s and JC Penney created an alliance with Threadup, a platform to start commercializing secondhand items.  

Threadup, on the other hand, received last August a capital injection of 175 million dollars, from several funds. For this operation, the CEO, James Reinhart, explained to Reuters, that the size of this market only in the American market rose up to 24 billion dollars.  

Zalando had already taken its first steps offline with the launch of temporary outlets in Germany. The company, that closed its first half with a rise of 20% in sales, opened its first store in 2015.