Nobis, a well known luxury outerwear retailer, has recently opened a new program, NEXT By Nobis – an online resale platform where products can achieve a longer life cycle.
“I am thrilled, I think we have nailed it on the branding. NEXT by Nobis functions well, but I believe it is directly connected to who we are as a brand. The result of which will be purposeful, it will be responsible, and will continue to allow us to invite people back into the new product offering but as well as finding consumers an outlet in an authorized way for the products they currently have,” says Robin Yates the Vice President of Nobis.
The intention of the resale platform is to allow consumers to directly sell their Nobis products in a safe environment. Nobis will have no interaction with the NEXT by Nobis customers or will handle products, it is simply used for consumers. If someone wants to buy a product from NEXT by Nobis, the current owner will ship it to the new consumer. Nobis was looking at a variety of different resale platforms; however, Yates said the team ultimately decided to create its own so consumers do not have to worry if the product is authentic or a copy.
“It is a direct consumer platform so we will provide the platform, but the consumer will put up their product. We don’t actually touch the product, it goes from a consumer to the new consumer and they pay for the shipping so we are at arm’s length. But we do create a scale of validating the quality of the product based on age, condition, and life so we set up a scale of price points which further give the new consumer the confidence that they are getting a jacket of a certain quality.”
How It Works
Each product at Nobis has a unique authenticator built in with a QR code. Consumers must register their product online in order to authenticate the product.
“It is perfect. Since we have this unique authenticator built into each jacket with a unique QR code on every piece, every product has a unique fingerprint and consumers are encouraged to login into the site and register to scan the QR code and that authenticates the product because we didn’t want any counterfeit products making its way through the resale platform.”
By providing a QR authenticator, Nobis is eliminating people from making the products and directing it to the resale site at a lower price. This program also ensures consumers are buying an authentic product of quality and do not have to doubt if it is real or not which Yates says is a big problem in their category.
Once consumers have completed the process, once their item is sold they have a choice between receiving 70 percent of the profit back in cash or 100 percent of the profit back with a Nobis gift card – both will have enough profit for Nobis to run the program.
Validating Products
In addition to the unique QR code, consumers must provide proof of quality of their item, this includes sending photos and answering questions. Consumers can scale their product from new with the tags still on to well worn and comfortably used at a lower price.
“We want to make sure it is a quality that is worthy of a resale, so we certainly do not want damaged products in there nor do we purposely put new products in there or anything like that. It is really made for that middle life of a product, so we definitely want to give the consumer that confidence that they can navigate the site to buy an authentic product and it will be in the condition they expect it to be in based on the way it is ranked.”
All products must have images matching the description and quality the consumer is providing and each application will be viewed and processed through the system to rank the product based on condition and provide a price. Yates said within the first 48 hours of Next By Nobis being open, they had 18 people who qualified but also noted that some of their older jackets may not have the QR code.
“We did have to vet people who did not have the QR code to authenticate and that is interesting. In the first two years of our existence we did not adopt this type of logo, so it is possible the item is old or it is also possible the item was not authentic. We would never see the product so we would not know, so for us it was really important to be cautious to really extend the capabilities of our band authentication and to make sure the Nobis consumer is satisfied.”
Nobis was founded in 2007 and opened its first flagship location in 2015 on Queen Street West in Toronto. Yates said the brand is always looking for ways to be more sustainable and this new program is vital as it will allow consumers to buy new product lines without having to waste. The program will also be coming at an amazing time as Nobis is having a new collection for Fall and Spring of 2023 which will include pants, new colour, new fabric materials, and also sustainable materials.
All products on the resale platform will be final sale and not returnable; however, if a consumer wishes to resale it they can. This rule will be broken if a consumer receives a product that does not match the description – if this is the case, the consumer will be able to get a return for their purchase.
“We have always made a point of doing better – doing a little bit better than you need to. Sustainability is part of your everyday life and we always have made good decisions even before we branded in a sustainable direction. The resale platform is vital to us. We have never been fast fashion and we have always tried to make products of high quality to exceed consumers expectations and this just really validates just exactly that and more purposely allows the product life cycle to be extended.”
