It’s hard enough for secondhand platforms in the Global North to make secondhand profitable, Rough continues, thanks to the heavy costs of running online resale businesses. For brands that want to get into the secondhand category, there are similar barriers to entry.
The recirculation service ACS offers varies between brands, but can include anything from cleaning to repairing to remanufacturing. “That comes at a cost,” says Rough. “Our team has to sort through boxes, grade the clothing based on condition, clean and repair each garment, photograph it, store it, pack it and post it. There are lots of steps involved, and it’s all quite manual still.” In general, clothing can be resold for around half its original retail price, explains Rough. Given all the work involved in recirculation, the absolute minimum retail price required to make the unit economics of resale viable would be around £40. But this is “really scraping the barrel”. If ACS wants to turn a decent profit on an item, the retail price should ideally be closer to £100 or more, ruling out the bulk of fast fashion.
Meanwhile, in Kantamanto Market, retailers are expected to operate on much tighter margins, despite offering a similar service. Following the devastating fire that razed most of Kantamanto Market to the ground in January 2025, The Or Foundation completed a census, the results of which will be published soon. One of the early findings, says Ricketts, is that the price of bales has increased since the fire, indicating that most retailers buying bales from the Global North would need to charge at least $3 per item to break even. But increasingly, the percentage of first selection items is so low — even when retailers pay a premium for higher quality bales — that most sellers need to price each first selection item closer to $5 to make up the shortfall. This is a huge stretch in one of Africa’s most expensive cities, where the minimum wage is as low as $2 per day.
“That obviously presents huge challenges for retailers, and it’s why we’re asking charities and resale platforms in the Global North to disclose their operating cost per garment,” she adds. Ricketts’s hope is that opening up a global conversation around operating costs in the secondhand market will foster solidarity, and show the value that ecosystems like Kantamanto add to secondhand clothing in their bid to recirculate as much as possible. So far, responses have been limited, and those that have disclosed have done so off-record.
What next?
There’s no easy solution to this — as Wone says, the question of redressing global imbalances of power in post-colonial trade routes is “far beyond” the remit of most fashion companies, and it’s not as simple as stopping the flow of secondhand goods, because these ecosystems rely on imports for business.
Some Kantamanto Market sellers say the best solution would be for people in the Global North intent on decluttering to send their low-quality goods straight to local landfill, rather than cascading the problem to the Global South, while donating higher quality goods instead of selling them, so businesses further down the chain have a chance to get first selection. Others suggest that incoming extended producer responsibility (EPR) legislation be amended, so the money collected from producers can be redistributed to the countries actually dealing with fashion’s waste crisis, but this is a long way off.
“It’s going to take significant investment in infrastructure, and finding alternative ways for retailers to sell their product onto recyclers, or finding new markets for upcycled products, for them to be able to make a living,” says Ricketts. “Whatever the solution looks like, we need solidarity between the Global North and the Global South. We need companies in the Global North not to be operating from a place of fear, and instead to accept the realities everyone in this business is facing: high volumes of low-quality clothing.”