Patagonia has moved its used clothes from a separate website to patagonia.com. Since 14 October 2026, its Worn Wear program has been part of the main site, and shoppers can pay for new and used items in one order. The aim is to reach more customers, not a side effect. The brand says only about half its customers know Worn Wear exists.
Worn Wear started in 2017 as a separate store with its own web address. It sold used clothes and backpacks.
How the new cart works
In practice, the change is simple. The cart can hold only used items, only new ones, or both, and shoppers pay once. Used items sit next to new ones on the main site, so people can compare price and condition in one place. The brand hopes to draw people who would not look for secondhand clothes but will be won over by the lower price.
Used items get one of three grades: "Excellent", "Great" or "Good". Returns and the Ironclad Guarantee are the same as for new items. New listings go up every Wednesday.
Patagonia has tried something similar before. In 2020, Worn Wear already appeared on the main site, and when a new item had a used twin, shoppers were pointed to the secondhand one. But used goods were still sold through a separate store then, and the platform behind it belonged to the company Trove. In October 2024, Trove launched a plug-in that lets brands put secondhand goods on their own pages, and Patagonia was the first to use it.
What the numbers show
In fiscal 2026, Worn Wear sold nearly 160,000 items, for about $13m in net sales. That works out at about $80 an item, a simple sum from the two figures. At the warehouse in Reno, Nevada, more than 40 staff handled more than 230,000 garments in 2025, and about 80% of what they process is fit for resale. The site holds about 40,000 items at a time.
Two-thirds of the stock comes from clothes the brand buys back, and about one-third from returns and warranty cases. A buyback usually pays about 20% of the garment's suggested price, and jackets are bought for between $10 and $200. The credit works on patagonia.com and in the brand's stores.
Sam Brown, who runs resale, says Worn Wear sells almost everything it takes in, so growth depends on supply. Nano Puff jackets and Black Hole duffels go fastest. The goal, he says, is: "We sell more used things so we make fewer new ones."
Why it took years
Brown says the move was a "huge internal effort" that required "building new skills in virtually every part of the business" (the quote is a translation). According to Trellis, it meant a multi-year overhaul of the systems for inventory, goods, website and pricing. The sources give no exact timeline, so "four years" cannot be confirmed with data.
The hard part of secondhand is that every item is one of a kind and in a different condition. So the brand had to handle many more different items, track discontinued models and set prices by condition. As early as 2020, Modern Retail reported that each piece might need repair, inspection and its own photo, which is a different task from shipping large batches of new clothes.
Ken Pucker, a professor of sustainability at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, says brands have been slow to bring secondhand onto their main sites because they fear it will eat into sales of new goods, and because one-off items are hard to price. He called Patagonia's move "bold". The retailer REI removed its Re/Supply section of used goods from its online stores in 2025, but kept it in its physical stores.
For now, Worn Wear works only for customers in the US. Patagonia says it hopes to reach Canada and the rest of the world, but has not given a date.