Erika Gerdemark/Bloomberg
H&M has spent more than a decade and upwards of €20 million ($24.4 million) building Sellpy into its answer to the secondhand clothing boom. A decade in, the resale platform still hasn’t turned a profit, and it remains a rounding error next to the rest of the retailer’s business.
H&M bought its first stake in Sellpy back in 2015 and now owns roughly 70% of the Swedish resale company. Despite that backing, Sellpy contributes less than half a percent of H&M Group’s total net sales. Broaden the lens to include resale activity across the wider H&M group and the number is still small: roughly 0.8% of total sales revenue in 2025, or about SEK 1.8 billion, close to $190 million, out of a retailer with sales many multiples larger.
H&M isn’t alone in struggling to make secondhand pay. More than 100 apparel retailers have launched in-house resale platforms over the past two years, chasing the same sustainability-minded shoppers, but even brands with strong resale credibility, including Patagonia and fast-fashion giant Shein, have yet to turn the category into more than a marginal slice of their profits.
The economics help explain why. Resale requires sorting, cleaning, authenticating and individually pricing garments that were often sold cheaply the first time around, a far more labor-intensive process than moving new inventory through a standard retail supply chain. That cost structure has made it difficult for even well-capitalized retailers to scale secondhand into a genuinely profitable line of business, rather than a sustainability showcase that keeps operating in the red.
For H&M, the calculus so far appears to be less about near-term profit and more about positioning: owning a majority stake in a resale platform lets the company point to concrete action on circularity even as the unit continues to lean on its parent company’s balance sheet, a decade after the first investment was made.
