Luxury should embrace China’s second-hand boom
While spending on new luxury goods contracted in 2025, the pre-owned trade is growing.
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Chinese shoppers have shed their old biases against used luxury goods, even as the fear of counterfeits remains an obstacle to buying second-hand.
PHOTO: BLOOMBERG
Juliana Liu
With a 20-year spending spree over, luxury brands must reinvent the way they relate to Chinese consumers. There’s no better way to do that than by embracing the country’s flourishing second-hand market.
China’s high-end retail boom was unprecedented in scale and speed while it lasted. A culture that values keeping up appearances found an outlet in Western prestige shopping when it opened to the world at the end of the 1990s, fuelling a period of expansion that lasted until the collapse of the property sector five years ago.