At AptDeco, consumers can buy vintage furniture, a Wayfair couch, and an Ikea bookcase for a fraction of their original prices. The resale marketplace facilitates sales across the U.S. by handling shipping and delivery and charging a fee based on the sale price.

Handling fulfillment in-house

AptDeco announced its expansion across the contiguous U.S. in November 2022. For transactions where the buyer and seller are both located in the Northeast U.S., the resale company handles shipping and logistics internally. AptDeco partners with another shipping company to handle sales outside that area.

The in-house delivery team, which doesn’t use warehouses or storage, has some distinct advantages for AptDeco’s business model, CEO Reham Fagiri says.

Curators help sellers create an accurate listing when they sell a piece of furniture. The delivery teams continue that process.

“We’ve trained our delivery teams to inspect items at pickup to ensure they are as advertised,” she says. AptDeco specifically trained the team “to handle used furniture from disassembly to wrapping items that typically will not already be in a box.”

It was worthwhile for AptDeco to train its own delivery service over using a professional moving company, Fagiri says. “Moving companies are in the business of moving entire homes versus single items,” so it wasn’t a good fit. 

Customers had low expectations for service

In-house delivery made financial sense for AptDeco, but it also made sense from a customer service perspective. Using AptDeco’s own vans and delivery team led to better customer feedback and more repeat customers, Fagiri said without sharing specifics. The last mile impacts the impression people have about AptDeco, and resale markets in general, she said.

“You’re in people’s homes, moving items that have history and in some cases, a sentimental footprint,” Fagiri said. AptDeco’s teams move items “with an understanding that they’re handling lived in and pre-loved items in people’s homes.”

When AptDeco launched in 2014, consumers had low expectations for service and logistics, she said. As resale items grew more popular over the last five years, customers now expect more. Part of why the approach has been successful is that AptDeco doesn’t use warehouses, she said. With warehouses, delivery teams move each item several times, with higher potential for damage and higher costs to consumers. The current business model, without warehouses, is the “most efficient use of our operational resources,” Fagiri said.

Resale is booming

AptDeco is part of a larger trend of consumers embracing secondhand goods, from furniture to clothing. U.S. consumers spent $16 billion on secondhand home furnishings in 2022, per vintage resale website Chairish’s 2022 Resale Report. 28.2% of that spending will happen online, the report says. The report projects spending to reach $22 billion by 2027, 29% more than in 2021. 

Resale home furnishing sales have grown twice as fast as overall home furniture sales since 2015 at 62.2% and 34.7%, respectively.

Consumers largely abandoned the stigma for secondhand products in home goods as well as clothing. 75% of consumers in GlobalData’s survey of about 3,000 people in ThredUp’s 2022 resale report said they are open to buying secondhand. Gen Z numbers were even higher at 83%. GlobalData provided the data for ThredUp’s report.

ThredUp ranks No. 781 in the Top 1000, Digital Commerce 360’s database of the largest North American online retailers.

Customers are increasingly interested in the environmental impact of their purchases, driving some to buy used and to  prioritize brands with eco-friendly policies. 43% of shoppers called sustainability a deciding factor in what they buy, according to luxury goods resale marketplace The RealReal’s 2022 Luxury Resale Report, which measured data from 28 million of its shoppers between January 2022 and June 2022 compared with the same period in 2021. 61% of Gen Z and Millennials consider themselves eco-conscious or sustainability-focused, according to GlobalData, compared with 51% of consumers overall.

The RealReal Inc. is No. 530 in the Top 1000. It is also No. 36 in Digital Commerce 360’s Online Marketplaces Database.

Sustainability is also a key part of AptDeco’s pitch to both buyers and sellers. The marketplace has a sustainability section on its website, including information about how much carbon dioxide emissions can be avoided by reselling or buying used furniture.

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