In our globalized society massconsumption is widespread. However there is a trend showingthat people are starting to re-use clothes instead of buying newly produced garments. Reasonsfor buying secondhand clothing are many. During the 1950s people strived to look likeeveryone else but in the 1960s this changed. Subcultures grew stronger. People wanted toseparate themselves from the masses. Secondhand clothing became a way to showindividuality. The development of secondhand clothing has been fairly slow until about 10years ago when a shift in attitudes happened.The growing awareness of the environment has contributed to the expansion of thesecondhand market. Press and media’s focus on how the textile industry has affected theenvironment has made people aware of the consequences. This has led to an increasedtransparency for the commercial companies, but it has also increased the interest forsecondhand clothing. In a society where values like individuality and authenticity has becomemore important than ever before the secondhand market fills a need. The customers’ strive tobe unique can be satisfied by providing garments that are one-off pieces.The secondhand market is yet rather unexplored. We became interested in finding out who theactors on the secondhand market are and how they run their businesses. The problem that thestudy is based upon is; What is the business model for secondhand clothing? In this study thebusiness model is defined as the way a company organizes their resources to create business.To answer our question we did a field study in Buffalo, New York State (USA). The reasonfor choosing Buffalo was that the city has an interesting economical background and arelatively large variety of secondhand shops. Buffalo lost its heavy industry during the 1960sand 1970s. Because of that, the population declined. Parallels have been drawn betweenBuffalo as a “secondhand city” and the secondhand market.The study has had a qualitative method of research. The empirical part is based on semistructuredinterviews. The selections of respondents have been chosen after type of shop toget a broad perspective. During the interviews both film- and audio recording has beenconducted, which has later been analyzed and interpreted.Theory and empirical facts were connected in the analyses. Our conclusions are that thedifferent types of shops selling secondhand clothing have got different business models. Whatseparates the business model of vintage- and consignment shops from the model of thrift- andcharity shops is that they focus on the customer when they organize their resources. Thebusiness model of thrift shops is to offer value creating processes. The customer becomes aco-producer in the consumption process.The changing attitudes towards secondhand clothing have increased the demand for usedclothes. Tendencies show that companies have started to acknowledge this and thereforeadjust their offer, store locations and promotion. Because of this thrift shops have started toapproach the business model of the vintage- and consignment shops where the customer is infocus. This change has been more evident on the Swedish market, however we think that thiswill happen on the American market as well. This shows that when garments start to beselectively chosen and sold in central locations the price increase which in turn decrease thecustomer’s part of the value-creating process. / Program: Textilekonomutbildningen

Shifting cultures of recycled style: a history of second-hand clothing markets in Montreal draws a cultural history of the evolving circuits through which discards of the fashion system pass. The focus is on three manifestations of the market: the female-dominated charity circuits of the nineteenth-century into which the flow of used goods was redirected following the introduction of mass-produced garments; the revival of cast-off clothing's stylish potential by punk and grunge subcultures in their respective creations of a poverty aesthetic; and the more heterogeneously mainstream market of the late 1980s and 1990s operating within a consumer environment seeped in nostalgia. / The second-hand market is a facet of the fashion system receiving scant attention by the academic community. This study aims to redress the oversight by demonstrating how much of a given society is revealed through the ways in which its members manage the matter of sartorial waste.

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