With so many clothes, so many platforms and so many sellers, New Zealand’s thrifting scene is bigger than ever. But although our shopping habits have shifted radically, not everyone’s sold.
No longer limited to your neighbourhood op shop, New Zealand’s resale apparel industry is now a sprawling market with more competition, more clothes and more choice than ever before. Is bigger really better or is it just overwhelming us?
Professor Lisa McNeill, University of Otago lecturer in the department of marketing and an expert in consumer psychology, decided to find out why some young, fashion-focused women weren’t keen on buying pre-loved clothing. “We wanted to know what the barriers were,” she says. “They weren’t shopping secondhand because they didn’t find it easier, they didn’t find it cheaper, and they were really dissatisfied with the options that were out there.”
Many told her it just as affordable to buy new clothes, and quicker. They found secondhand shopping overwhelming, or felt it wasn’t worth the effort due to the demands of time, the low quality of clothing and lack of choice.
“If something’s difficult, challenging or it’s not satisfying, or you can’t get what you actually want, it doesn’t motivate you towards taking part,” McNeill explains. “You’ve got to really be driven by those core sustainability values to put aside ease and functionality and availability and cost.”
There have never been more ways to shop secondhand, with online retail platforms making buying and selling accessible and efficient. Simply open your phone and search everything in the world via eBay and Etsy, or turn to global fashion-focused platforms Depop, Vestiaire Collective, First Dibs and The Realreal. For closer-to-home options, of course there’s Trade Me and Facebook Marketplace, as well as New Zealand’s home-grown fashion resale platform: Designer Wardrobe. Though there are a staggering 9,133 different tagged brands on the site, “we focus on making the whole experience feel less like wading through a massive marketplace”, explains CEO and co-founder Aidan Bartlett.
When it comes to promoting resale as an alternative, the biggest challenges are building trust and shifting consumer habits, says Bartlett. “Buying new is the path of least resistance, and that’s not changing overnight.” However, they’ve seen a genuine cultural shift around resale. “It’s not niche any more.” The platform facilitates $22 million in transaction value across New Zealand and Australia each year. Around one in 10 women in New Zealand have signed up.
Offline there are options too. You’ll find op shops across the country; New Zealand has 125 Salvation Army Family Stores, 90 SPCA stores, 54 Vinnie’s Shops run by Society of St Vincent de Paul, and 28 SaveMarts. Consignment stores – which sell on behalf and take a percentage of the sale – include Tatty’s in Auckland and Recycle Boutique nationwide. Fashion brands are getting in on the action too; Ruby launched a dedicated resale store in 2025 and Kowtow Relove offers a buyback model in exchange for store credit.
Exactly how much New Zealanders spend on secondhand goods is hard to quantify. In the year to September 2025, $232 million in sales were recorded with antique and secondhand retailers, but Stats NZ says this figure excludes larger businesses where only a minority of the activity can be classed as “antique and used goods retailing”. Also uncounted are businesses that primarily provide auctioning or commission-based services, online businesses that don’t have a physical store, and non-GST transactions like garage sales or Facebook Marketplace.
Trade Me’s latest annual report on the Circular Economy, released in February 2026, put the size of New Zealand’s secondhand market at $5.2 billion – up $500m on the previous year – with clothing, accessories and footwear accounting for 67%.
There’s an overwhelming amount of clothing in circulation. “There is just so much stock out there,” agrees vintage seller Juliet Stimpson, who sells via Instagram and Trade Me under the name Noon Goods. “If you ask any op shop manager how many donations they get in an average week and how much they can put out and sell, the amount they get will pretty much always outweigh the amount they can put into store.”
But not everyone’s swamped. “Salvation Army Family Stores have not seen any significant change in the volume or quality of donations in recent years,” says Gareth Marshall, national director. While they do notice upswings in donations during decluttering periods like Christmas and spring, “overall donations have remained steady for decades”.
A 2023 study produced for Auckland Council into clothing consumption and waste estimated that New Zealanders donated 33,975 tonnes of clothing to op shops each year. Only 20% is of good enough quality to be sold.
A decline in quality is something McNeill, the Otago researcher, has noticed. “A lot of what’s being disposed of is that stuff that’s coming from Shein,” she says. Some stores are turning away items because the volume of donations is so high. “They’re starting to [think] is this saleable, not just wearable? Is this something the market’s actually going to want?”
Tatty’s is explicit about brands it won’t take, including Shein, Cotton On, Glassons and Tarocash. Taking a similar approach is the reuse store at Raglan’s Xtreme Zero Waste recycling centre, which is no longer taking Shein garments due to the volume of donations and low quality of garments.
Whether op shops should accept clothes from Shein, Temu and The Warehouse at all is debatable. Commenters on a recent post in the Op Shopping New Zealand Facebook Group were divided as to whether people should sell them like “everything else”, donate them to women’s refuge, “give them away or put them in the bin” or, as one person suggested, “burn in an environmentally friendly incinerator that produces energy as a waste product”.
True vintage clothing – generally at least 20 years old – is getting more difficult to source. “It feels a little bit picked over,” says Gemini Vintage’s Helen Olivia Anstis. She’s been selling vintage on and off since she was a teenager. “It’s definitely different from when I was younger.” Anstis sells at vintage markets in Auckland and shares a physical store with Dead Man Vintage in Auckland’s Grey Lynn, which opened five months ago.
She reckons she spends at least 10 hours a day sourcing. “Way more than I earn – it’s not a good profit margin.” Stumbling upon really special pieces happens less frequently. Those that are out there are usually priced accordingly, because sellers are more aware of what brands are worth. “You’re not gonna find [Japanese brand] Comme des Garçons in a $1 rummage bin, which I did when I was like 20.”
Online seller Stimpson says she usually finds something exciting when op-shopping. “What one person deems as a great find is so subjective and there will always be people who feel like there’s nothing good left… However there is definitely so much less out there in the way of 60s and 70s and even 80s vintage than there was even 10 years ago.” While prices have increased and there’s more competition, Stimpson thinks more items are being recirculated these days and there is “definitely” enough to go around. “Overall I think it’s getting easier.”
There’s plenty going around at Central Flea Market in Auckland suburb Balmoral each Sunday. Established by Nicole and Richard Stewart in 2019, it’s now probably the biggest regular vintage market in the country. Marketgoers dress up for the occasion and spend hours rummaging. “There’s lots of people in their 20s that are really into vintage and flipping [sourcing and reselling secondhand clothes with varying markups], which is cool to see. It’s definitely a hip thing,” says Anstis. “There’s so much competition and there’s so many vendors.”
McNeill says interest in secondhand shopping often aligns with “liminal” life phases (like finishing university), when people have both the money and time required for thrifting, and an interest in fashioning their identity.
The young women McNeill spoke to for her research cited sizing as a barrier to shopping secondhand, and others agreed. “If you’re above a 14 it’s really hard,” explains Anstis, adding that people in that category “definitely don’t buy as much vintage, because it’s not really there for them”. Plus-size shoppers have described the struggle to find secondhand clothes “demoralising”.
“There is always so much more available secondhand in smaller sizes and lots of theories about [why],” notes Stimpson. She says that online resale has made finding larger sizes a bit easier, due to filter functions.
Nor does everyone want to wear secondhand clothes. The idea that people in low income brackets should only shop secondhand is, McNeill thinks, a privileged and middle-class perspective. “Why should somebody on a lower income feel obliged to only shop secondhand if they can buy new?” she explains. “Secondhand shopping is not necessarily that much cheaper than buying fast fashion.”
Designer Wardrobe’s Aidan Bartlett thinks that what is changing is what people care about. “Younger shoppers are thinking differently and seeing pre-loved clothing as an alternative to fast fashion,” he said. “The practical case is pretty compelling… Once people try it, most don’t stop.”
