Rokit turns forty in September, with four shops in London — one of them an accessories store opened on Brick Lane this year — and one in Cardiff. Demand was never the difficulty; the four decades since 1986 went into the harder question of where the next coat comes from. The asset is the supply line, and nobody sells one of those.

The numbers have caught up with the shop floor. ThredUp’s fourteenth resale report, built on GlobalData figures, puts the global secondhand market at $393 billion by 2030 and names supply as the constraint. Its remedy is friction: another $23.3 billion of American market value sits behind the work of making selling as easy as buying. That is a fair diagnosis of a warehouse and a poor one of a rail.

You cannot recruit your way to 1990.

Vintage is the rare category with a fixed supply. Every garment that will be forty years old in 2030 was made by 1990, and no amount of seller onboarding adds one to that number. What the world is making instead: 132 million tonnes of fibre in 2024, 78 million tonnes of it polyester. Much of it will outlast the people who bought it. Surviving is not the same as being wanted.

Eibhleann McMahon, Rokit’s creative director, watches the grade fall from the shop floor. “The grade in vintage has changed a lot,” McMahon told FashionUnited. “As it’s returned to market once, twice, even three times, it’s dying off.” Circulation is not free. A resale is a line on the ledger and a wear on the garment.

Rokit’s suppliers are learning they can be retailers. Resellers spent a decade buying from people who had nowhere else to take their clothes; now, McMahon says, “the people they’re buying off can sell themselves.” A supplier who can reach the buyer directly stops being a supplier.

Vinted’s members traded €10.8 billion of goods in 2025, up 47 percent. None of it passed a sorting table. The fight for Rokit’s supply plays out on the seller’s bed, long before a shopper ever sees a rail.

The answer to a shrinking grade is not a better search box. Rokit now cuts existing stock into new pieces under a line called Rokit Originals, which arrives dressed as a creative decision with a sourcing decision underneath. Nobody reworks a garment they could simply buy again.

What none of this touches is the one supplier. Most of Rokit’s stock comes from a single textile recycling operation in Canada, an arrangement old enough that the feedback runs in both directions. Anywhere else that would be called a concentration risk; here it is the business. A marketplace can index every listing in Europe and still not be first in line for the stock. Forty years bought a place at the front of a queue that no longer forms.