EXCLUSIVE: Trove Acquires Recurate in Branded Resale Consolidation

Branded resale giant Trove just got bigger.

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The company, which helps brands set up their own resale operations, acquired custom resale platform Recurate for an undisclosed amount, executives told WWD exclusively.

The deal, which closed Monday, pulls Recurate ’s systems, business and executives into the Trove ecosystem, extending the scope of the latter’s branded resale platform. Recurate’s Wilson Griffin, cofounder and chief executive officer, and Adam Siegel, fellow cofounder, chief product officer and chief operating officer, will step into new roles at Trove as vice president of sales and vice president of product, respectively.

The potential for banding together became evident when Terry Boyle, CEO at Trove, met Griffin through friends and realized how their products could fit together. “I think there’s a need to kind of turbocharge resale for brands, and the combination makes a lot of sense,” Boyle told WWD.

Recurate bills itself as a resale operating system that offers brands ownership of their secondhand market via a custom resale marketplace. “It is a complementary product that fills some product niches that Trove didn’t have itself,” said Boyle. “It gives us a peer-to-peer solution. It gives us a Shopify solution that we like a lot. So it basically allows us to create a one-stop shop for brands’ resale needs, and they can kind of create the program that they want to create.

“Really, we have every component of a product and resale that you would need now,” Boyle said.

With the acquisition zipped up, the company estimates significant growth in traffic with fashion, home and accessories categories joining the portfolio, along with 29 new brand partners, including Steve Madden, Frank & Eileen, Frye, Coyuchi, Clare V, Michael Kors and others.

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Across its spate of expanded solutions — including peer-to-peer trade-ins and the Shopify integration — Trove said that it now commands over 75 percent of the branded resale traffic in the U.S. This, it believes, casts the company as the market’s single most scalable and comprehensive resale technology provider. Trove promises that it can launch programs for brands of any size in as little as four weeks.

In large part, that’s the very vision that attracted Recurate’s Griffin.

“We want to bring more brands into the branded retail space, and that really comes down to making it as simple, easy and profitable to run these programs as we can,” Griffin said. “That starts with the selection of a service provider, and how we can simplify that process for brands and bring best-in-class solutions under one banner … [to] hopefully just make it easier and more profitable to manage these programs for the long term.

“I think we could have waited a number of years to mature, but for us, this is an incredible shortcut to bring all those amazing services and tools under one roof for our brands.”

The timing appears apt, as calls for sustainable practices have brands at all levels seeking out secondhand or resale programs as one way to reduce waste. But for Boyle, the message to brands is that there’s more to resale than just building green cred.

“The biggest challenge is having brands understand that, yes, this is good for the environment, but it’s also good for your business, right?” he said. “You can drive revenue growth, you can increase margin recaps, or you can drive new customer growth. So there’s lots of ways to play it.”

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