National Consignment Month
October is a fan-favorite month among the American people—a 2023 YouGov poll found it was the country’s number two pick for the year’s most loved month, second only to December—and for good reason. With the first full month of autumn comes all sorts of good things to celebrate: Halloween, cool temperatures, pumpkin spice-flavored everything, and perhaps surprisingly, consignment.
The RealReal first hailed the first Monday of every October National Consignment Day in 2017, but celebrating the sustainable commerce method lasts longer than just one day. Over the years, The RealReal has kept the consignment party rolling all 31 days of the month. As a result, October has become known as National Consignment Month—just one more reason for Americans to love it.
What Is Consignment, and Who Does It?
Consignment is a retail strategy where a person or business—the “consignor”—leaves items with a third-party seller. The third party, a.k.a. the “consignee,” stores and sells the consignor’s goods on their behalf. Once a sale has been made, the consignee pays the consignor the money earned, minus the percentage of the profit they take to pay themselves.
Consignment isn’t a new shopping and resale strategy. However, it is a newly popular one, thanks to millennials and Gen Z. These generations live to “thrift,” often choosing gently loved, lower-priced goods over brand new, full-priced ones. Their love of doing so has caused the resale clothing industry to boom.
These two people groups gravitate toward the resale fashion world for several reasons. The first has been mentioned already: lower prices. Affordability is a common motivator for shoppers, so it’s unsurprising that millennials and Gen Z would go the more cost-effective route.
The generations’ growing interest in sustainability contributes to their affinity for consignment, too. Gen Z is especially conscious of the social and environmental impact of their shopping habits, with around 75% of shoppers in this age group declaring that sustainability matters more to them than a brand name does.
How Is Consignment Done?
In the days of yore, consignment was, like most other things, a primarily in-person activity. Consignors had to haul their goods to a brick-and-mortar location to hand them off to the consignee. Now, thanks to the power of the internet, a person looking to part with their pre-owned belongings can ship them off to an online consignee.
One of these online consignment shops is The RealReal. Founded in 2011, The RealReal is a luxury consignment company dedicated not only to extending the lives of clothes, shoes and accessories but also to sustainable fashion. Unfortunately, fashion is one of the most wasteful industries in the world, with a whopping 2,000+ garments being discarded every second. Those trashed pieces were likely made with non-biodegradable materials, meaning they’ll sit in a landfill and pollute the Earth rather than break down safely. While shopping and selling through platforms like The RealReal doesn’t stop the fast fashion cycle—the cycle of mass-produce, buy, throw away and repeat—it does decrease the number of clothing items going to waste.
Contributing to the resale fashion world helps reduce the industry’s environmental impact as a whole. The RealReal alone has made significant strides as far as sustainability is concerned. These fast facts about TRR are proof:
- From its establishment through March 2024, The RealReal has kept more than 39.2 million luxury items in circulation. Plus, the company saved 4.15 billion liters of water and 76,449 metric tons of carbon.
- In 2020, TRR achieved carbon neutrality—that means striking a balance between emitting and absorbing carbon into and from the atmosphere—a year before it was expected to do so.
- The RealReal is a founding member of the American Circular Textiles Group (ACT), an initiative geared toward making the United States a leader in circular fashion and decreasing textile waste.
Celebrate National Consignment Month
Now, with a clearer understanding of what consignment is and how it can positively impact the planet, you probably get why TRR decided it was worthy of an entire month of celebration. But if you still don’t get the hype, perhaps looking at a few of the other pros of consignment will drive the point home.
- Consignors get to clear out their closets while earning a few extra dollars. As a bonus, they don’t have to worry about storing their gently used clothes, shoes and accessories until they sell.
- Online shops offer consigners a lot more visibility for their item(s) than they can produce themselves. This means you don’t have to drop the price in order to entice people to buy.
- Shopping consignment helps fashion lovers develop their own unique senses of style by exposing them to pieces that stand out from whatever trends the mainstream style crowd is currently following.
Positive characteristics like these and more make venturing into the consignment world seem more compelling, right? If the benefits of this retail strategy have you searching for a sign to give it a try, this is it—jump on the resale bandwagon this National Consignment Month and use The RealReal to do it.
TRR makes shopping and selling high-quality, previously loved items easy. Become a member and you’ll not only be able to recycle the luxury goods you no longer wear, you’ll also be able to select new pieces for your wardrobe from the wide selection of items other members have parted with. Plus, if you join The RealReal during National Consignment Month, you have the opportunity to sell and earn up to $450 extra!
If you’re reading this after National Consignment Month is over, don’t fret. Simply put next year’s National Consignment Day date in your calendar—remember it falls on the first Monday of October every year—and start consigning anyway. It’s a year-long activity, just as rewarding during the other 11 months.