Gen Z shoppers are checking a designer bag’s resale value before they’ll agree to buy it new, according to RealReal CEO Rati Sahi Levesque, who says younger luxury buyers now treat the secondhand market as a pricing reference before they’ll spend on a first-hand purchase.

Key Points

• RealReal CEO Rati Sahi Levesque told FashionNetwork on August 19, 2026, that Gen Z and millennial shoppers — the platform’s fastest-growing customer segment — are checking resale prices before buying luxury items new.
• More than 80% of that fastest-growing segment scans the secondary market first, per the same report.
• Chanel’s Classic Flap bag now resells for roughly $11,700, having doubled in resale value since 2019, according to FashionNetwork’s reporting on RealReal’s pricing data.
• Levesque said of the trend: “We’re seeing a lot of confidence in what they’re spending.”
• She added that Gen Z shoppers are approaching decades-old brands as new discoveries: “The Gen-Z demographic is discovering them for the first time, where I grew up with those items, which always surprises me.”

For a generation raised on thrifted denim and depop hauls, that behavior isn’t really new — it’s just moved upmarket. What’s changed is that resale value has become a purchase filter rather than a fallback plan. Instead of asking whether a bag is worth the sticker price, younger shoppers are asking whether it will hold value if they ever need to sell it, and pricing their new purchase against what the same item commands used.

That shift is measurable in hard numbers. Chanel’s quilted Classic Flap, long considered the industry’s benchmark for handbag resale performance, has climbed to roughly $11,700 on the secondary market — about double what it commanded in 2019, according to FashionNetwork’s report on RealReal’s internal data. Bloomberg, which also covered Levesque’s comments, framed the behavior as younger shoppers “hunting for handbags, jewelry and apparel” while “increasingly price-checking the resale market before buying new items to gauge their future potential worth.”

Levesque, who has led the platform’s push into categories beyond handbags, also pointed to jewelry and watches as areas where Gen Z buyers now expect resale liquidity as a baseline expectation rather than a bonus. “I think people expect jewellery, watches, and vintage,” she said, describing categories where younger buyers now treat proven resale performance as part of the purchase decision itself.

The behavior marks a departure from how older generations shopped luxury — buy first, worry about resale only when downsizing or trading up. For Gen Z, the resale check has become part of the original purchase, turning secondhand pricing data into something closer to a credit score for the things people choose to buy new.