We turned the website off

Why not buy used on the Peak Design Marketplace, instead?

By Peak Design

April 22^nd, 2022

This story was originally published on Earth Day 2022, when we blockaded our website to encourage shoppers to buy used gear instead. This year we've done it again. Read on to find out why.

Our product design process is meticulous, time-consuming, and hard.

On the marketing side, we tend to avoid things that are meticulous, time-consuming, and hard. Heck, look at our product names. The current process for naming products at Peak Design is to actually not name them. 20L Everyday Backpack. That’s not a name, that’s a description. Coupla weak-ass adjectives and a noun.

When we decided to build a website where people can buy and sell used Peak Design gear, we stuck to what we knew and christened it the ‘Peak Design Marketplace.’ Flashy. Aspirational. Rolls right off the tongue.

But the name suits it. The PD Marketplace was designed to let people buy and sell used PD products in the easiest way possible. No complicated buy-back program. No logistical nightmare of warehousing a bunch of random unpackaged inventory coming in from all over the place. No middlemen. Instead, customers buy directly from (and ship directly to) other customers.

Meet the Marketplace

Compared to brands with buy-back programs, the peer-to-peer PD Marketplace is much more logistically simple. It’s also cheaper—for us, and for our customers. And it’s a bit easier on the environment, because it eliminates an extra shipment.

Best of all, it works. Like, really well. We launched the PD Marketplace 2 years ago and within a couple months it was humming along with relatively little marketing or upkeep. Nowadays, anywhere from 60-100+ sales happen every week. The sell-through rate is 98%. Most products are sold within a week of being listed. To-date, almost 3000 people in the US and Canada have bought and sold over 5800 items.

In 2022, we introduced 'PD Certified' items to the Marketplace. These are open-box and refurbished items that are sold directly by Peak Design. We used to list these items for sale on eBay, but eventually decided it made more sense to include them in the Marketplace. The moment we switched over, our sell-through rate for gently used inventory nearly quadrupled.

We never put any revenue goals or expectations behind the Marketplace, nor would that make much sense, given customers are primarily buying stuff from each other (instead of us) and the small cut we take is mainly offset by platform fees. But when we dig deeper it would appear that the PD Marketplace is actually growing our business in some interesting ways. A majority of PD Marketplace buyers are first-time purchasers of Peak Design gear, presumably taking advantage of the opportunity to buy our gear for less. On the seller side, most sellers use their proceeds to buy more Peak Design products, spending almost double their store credit. We’ve also seen zero evidence of the PD Marketplace cannibalizing new product sales, even though we directly promote used product listings on our main website.

Our discontinued 'Heritage Tan' color is now only found on the Marketplace.

Since launching the PD Marketplace, we’ve fielded endless questions from other brands interested in doing something similar. How do we build a used product marketplace? How do we incorporate it in the customer journey and incentivize people to use it? How do we get more Canadians to participate? Some of these questions are mysteries.

But there is one answer…one piece of salient advice…that underlies all of this. To have a used product marketplace, you first must have a used product market. And the best way to do that is to design and build products that retain their value, last a long time, and maybe even get better with age.

See what we did there? We just lured you into a manifesto. WE GOT YOU GOOD.

Good product design yields products that stay good for a long time. They retain their functionality, looks, and cachet. They outlast fads and trends because they were never part of one in the first place. They age gracefully. They don’t wear out, they break in. They don’t get scratched up, they develop patina. They can be cleaned and maintained. If they break they can be serviced, either by the user or by the manufacturer.

Good product design is easier said than done. For products like ours, it means relentlessly researching and sampling materials. It means building ridiculous apparatuses with singular purposes, like seeing how a strap adjuster works after 20,000 cycles. It means intentionally limiting our backpack color options to ones that will still be popular 10 or 20 years from now.

Our product design process is meticulous, time consuming, and hard. And because of that, the success of the Peak Design Marketplace has come pretty darn easy.

This Earth Day, we’re encouraging folks to shop used before shopping new, whenever they can swing it. And for the makers out there, we encourage you to design things that will remain useful and desirable for a long time.

The Peak Design Marketplace is the fastest, easiest way to buy and sell used Peak Design gear. Visit market.peakdesign.com to get started.

Sell faster and with zero fees when you choose payout in Peak Design store credit. Shop confidently, knowing items will arrive in the described condition or your money back. Peak Design products are guaranteed for life, whether they are bought first-hand or tenth-hand.