In the last decade, buying and selling pre-owned luxury bags has become a huge business online. It’s also seen as a huge liability among luxury brands.
In 2021 a well known luxury brand approached Trove, wanting to have more control over their brand by accepting and reselling verified handbags themselves.
I designed a trade-in experience that allowed customers to specify their product, select its condition, receive a trade-in quote, and mail in their bag—or, simply make an in-person appointment at a nearby store.
This was Trove’s first foray into the luxury category, and one key challenge particular to luxury brands was in helping customers accurately set expectations about a bag’s condition, in order to avoid the disappointment of receiving less store credit—or none whatsoever—for a bag originally priced in the thousands.
One aspect of our solution was to anchoring customers to the lowest, and most common, accepted condition in order to set modest expectations. Another aspect was to include multiple, high-resolution examples of an accepted bag for each condition. Finally, if the actual trade-in value was lower than the estimate, the customer had the ability to decline the offer and have their bag returned to them, no questions asked.
