The negative trend in the consumer market has not affected the growth of the second-hand market.
Chinese circular fashion brand Hongbulin (Chinese: 红布林) raised USD 100 million in series C financing round. This funding round was invested by Zhuanzhuan (Chinese: 转转集团), a second-hand trading platform. The funds will be mainly used for service standardization, user experience improvement, product development and database construction.
Hongbulin, founded in 2017, is a circular fashion platform with second-hand luxury trading as the core. The trading products cover a full range of trendy fashion categories such as bags, shoes and apparel, jewelry and watches.
Hongbulin's business is growing rapidly this year, and its revenue will double in 2022 compared to the same period of the previous year. In Q4 2021, the monthly active users of Hongbulin surpassed Secoo (Chinese:寺库) and ranked among the head of luxury e-commerce platforms.
The second-hand resale market for women's fashion and luxury goods is the largest category in the second-hand market in many regions, said Huang Wei, CEO of Zhuanzhuan. The launch of Hongbulin second-hand fashion goods will enrich the category of the resale platform, and the two companies will continue to cooperate in fashion goods and services.
Due to the popularity of rational and low-carbon consumption concepts, second-hand sales and purchases of used cars, used 3Cs, used books and other second-hand items continue to boom. According to an industry research report by Frost & Sullivan, the scale of the second-hand market in China has increased from about CNY 300 billion in 2015 to over CNY 1 trillion in 2020, and the figure is expected to reach nearly CNY 3 trillion by 2025.
In addition to trading scale, operational health is a business indicator that Hongbulin has focused more on in recent years. Xu Wei, founder and CEO of Hongbulin, said that achieving profitability under the condition of revenue and scale has been the critical element of the company in recent years, and will be the foundation of Hongbulin's survival in the future.