Case 02 · Editorial resale for archival fashion
Closet
A mobile resale platform that treats every garment like an artifact, using editorial curation and visible authentication to rebuild trust in secondhand luxury.
01 Overview
Secondhand luxury has a trust problem.
Resale apps are crowded, badly photographed, and full of doubt. For buyers of high-end archival pieces, a cluttered feed makes a $700 pair of boots look like a $20 thrift find, and every listing raises the same question: is this real?
Closet answers with an editorial-first interface. Instead of an endless grid, pieces are presented in curated stories with gallery-style layouts, and authentication is shown up front as a visible certificate rather than buried in fine print.
- Problem
- Visual clutter and authenticity anxiety erode the perceived value of luxury resale
- Approach
- Curation over volume; trust components designed as first-class UI
- Deliverables
- Market research, personas, mobile IA, design system, high-fidelity screens
02 Market research
A $60B market that still feels like a flea market.
Luxury resale has grown from a niche hobby into a global industry. I gathered 2024 to 2026 trend data to understand what buyers value and where current platforms lose them.
- 45%
- of Gen Z check resale value before buying
- 30%
- higher cart abandonment without clear authentication
- 70%
- of Gen Z favor brands with circular commitments
Two findings mattered most. Buyers increasingly treat fashion as an asset, and rare pieces from the 1990s and 2000s are appreciating quickly. Yet the platforms they buy on are designed for volume, not provenance. Trust, not inventory, was the gap.
03 Personas
A collector and a minimalist.
The asset curator
Sophie, 24
An archival collector and frequent seller who sees fashion as a financial asset. Cluttered apps like Depop bury her best pieces. She wants to sell authenticated work quickly to fund her next “grail.”
The conscious minimalist
Leo, 29
A casual luxury buyer who wants quality over quantity and a smaller footprint. He hesitates because he can’t verify condition or authenticity, and he wants timeless pieces without “sustainability guilt.”
Sophie pushed the selling flow to be fast and credible. Leo pushed the buying flow to be calm and reassuring. Both pointed to the same core need: proof, presented beautifully.
04 Information architecture
Three zones: discover, trust, sell.
I organized the app around the three jobs users come to do, so the navigation itself tells the story of the product.
Discovery
- Editorial hero drops (themed collections)
- AI semantic search by era, e.g. “Phoebe Philo era”
- Curated daily picks
Product & trust
- 360° high-resolution gallery
- “Verified Authentic” certificate
- Eco-impact calculator (water and CO₂ saved)
Selling (the Vault)
- AI listing wizard with tag scanning
- Market value estimator
- Dashboard with wardrobe footprint and sales
05 UX strategy
The editorial solution.
- Magazine-style discovery. Curated stories replace infinite grids to reduce choice paralysis.
- Visual proof. A gold-and-charcoal “security seal” pattern marks every trust component, so authenticity reads at a glance.
- Frictionless selling. AI vision reads tags and fills in details, cutting listing time from about ten minutes to sixty seconds.
06 Design system
Quiet luxury, in tokens.
The visual system, which I called Editorial Luxury Archive, pairs a warm paper surface with near-black type and a single antique-gold accent reserved for authentication. Playfair Display carries the editorial voice in headlines; a clean sans handles prices, specs, and UI.
- Surface
#FBF9F3 - Ink
#1B1C18 - Seal gold
#775A19 - Seal light
#FED488 - Archive green
#0E1F13
07 High-fidelity screens
Four screens, one feeling of confidence.
08 Reflection
What I’d test next.
Closet taught me to design trust as a visible system rather than a policy page. My next step would be testing the authentication seal with real buyers: does it raise confidence, or does it need third-party proof behind it to be believed? I would also prototype the listing wizard with real garments to measure how close it gets to the sixty-second goal.
