Poshmark, Eon, Coachtopia Form Triumvirate for Instant Resale

Three major-in-their-market industry players have joined forces to usher digital product passport (DPP) technology into the resale sector .

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Building on Eon and Coachtopia’s relationship, in which the “have taste, love waste” brand’s products come embedded with a near-field communication (NFC)-powered Digital ID, consumers can now resell retired pieces on Poshmark with—quite literally—the click of a button. In making these products resale-ready, the trifecta is not just helping the consumer participate in the circular economy and boost value but also procuring a ton of relevant data on second-life transactions.

“We see a future where your closet is constantly in rotation and can go live at any point in time. This technology makes it super easy to go from owning it, to using it to selling it,” Manish Chandra , Poshmark’s founder and CEO, told Sourcing Journal. “And that speed and velocity is what we feel the future of fashion and sustainability is: where sustainability is built into the product itself.”

The exciting part of the partnership, Chandra continued, is that the technology not only enables this idea—sustainability built into a bag—but encourages propagating it as well. Once one recovers from the initial “wow factor” of how easy it is to convert something into its digital form, he said, one will expect that out of everything.

And while navigating this “futuristic landscape” requires intrepid exploration of uncharted territory, Chandra believes DPPs are a “net positive” to the resale sector—pending that propagation.

“We feel that the more people participate in it, the more people engage with it,” he said. “It’s a net-positive to the industry because the proportion of products in the sustainability movement in actual circulation is such a small fraction of the stuff that’s sitting out there not in circulation; all we can hope to do is ferment that revolution .”

The best way to do so? Make it excessively simple. The first step was choosing an appropriate partner; the Ergo collaborator was a no-brainer.

“Coach is a beloved brand on Poshmark; we have millions of our community members following the brand,” Alison Lyness, Poshmark’s head of business development, said, noting the preexisting relationship with the Tapestry-owned brand . “Coachtopia was a really logical place to start because it is such a circularity-forward and sustainability-oriented brand.”

Here’s how it works: Coachtopians tap the embedded NFC tag inside the purse with a smartphone. A comprehensive landing page pops up, covering everything from the bag’s environmental impact and material matrix to how to care for it and see what circular services make the most sense.

Of course, the option to resell the item on Poshmark is also made very clear. Clicking the “Resell with Poshmark” button moves the user into the “ Poshmark experience ,” where an interstitial page gives one a virtual slap on the back for joining the circular economy before producing a complete, pre-filled listing on the Promoted Closet company’s platform. The only detail to enter is the listing’s price.

“It’s a huge convenience asset and it’s great for the buyer as well,” Lyness said. “Now, they’re seeing really rich, detailed product information that the seller can choose to augment, but it’s a very intuitive and simple experience for everyone involved.”

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As every Coachtopia piece comes with a digital passport, every product made since the program began last April is viable for this process. And the Coach subbrand benefits from this process, too. Coachtopia is granted access to near real-time resale data from Poshmark—stats like which products were resold and for how much. That data is then recorded in the item’s digital ID to increase transparency, build consumer trust and provide Gen Z’s beloved brand with new insights into the end-to-end product lifecycle.

“The unique digital passport embedded in Coachtopia products is a critical element in our mission to pioneer circularity in fashion, providing visibility on each product’s journey as it lives multiple lives—both for us as a brand and for our growing global community,” said Joon Silverstein , senior vice president of global marketing and sustainability at Coach and head of Coachtopia. “I’m excited to extend our partnership with Eon and Poshmark both to expand that visibility outside our own trade-in and resale platforms and to make it easier than ever for our Coachtopians to resell their products and so help us build a better future for our industry.”

Poshmark now joins Coachtopia as a partner of Eon Exchange, an integrated partner marketplace enabling brands to embed valuable services into their products. This is how Coachtopia and Poshmark can data swap details to “unlock competitive insights” and provide end-to-end traceability —a “critical ability” for Coachtopia’s mission to design and pioneer a circular business model, per Silverstein.

“A key tenet of a circular system is that products are resold and reused rather than sent to landfill,” Silverstein continued. “Data that can provide us with insights about the secondary market and how to encourage these behaviors, as well as eliminate frictions around reselling and reusing, allows us to better design circular products and experiences that help us collectively advance on the road to circularity .”

Part of that journey includes reimagining the dynamic between the brand and the consumer; where a traditional and linear system would see this process as transactional —the brand sells, a consumer buys and that’s it—a circular system prioritizes keeping those products in circulation for as long as possible, whether that’s on Poshmark or not.

“This partnership reflects the importance of an ongoing relationship between brands and customers, which no longer ends at the first point-of-sale,” said Natasha Franck , Eon’s founder and CEO. “Now, brands can drive continuous revenue, relationships and data across the entire product lifespan.”

Luxury e-tailer The RealReal began leveraging Eon’s Digital ID technology platform earlier this year to provide consignors a more streamlined selling experience while giving authenticators an added data layer. Last February, the New York-based firm launched Instant Resale with luxury B Corp Chloé , also using the tool that helps companies tag and identify items across their life cycles, on Vestiaire Collective .

Eon has been in the resale space—or at least, working to be—for quite some time now. In 2020, the CircularID Protocol developer introduced its partner network to help companies, including Recurate and Evrnu , think the same way about managing, directing and tracking garment flow across the value chain. This marketplace was rebranded to Eon Exchange and now counts Archive and Worldly (plus another 50 or so players) as partners.

“When I started seven years ago, there was no ‘digital product passport,’ no word for what I was trying to do—which is kind of crazy—but now there’s this understanding that, as soon as you ID a product, you can turn it into an asset,” Franck told Sourcing Journal. “Some say resale is separate, but it’s really a continuation of product traceability; now, brands get that.”

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