Introduction
This September 1st to 2nd, 2025, we had the incredible opportunity to represent Trendful as a finalist at the Luxury Innovation Summit & Awards in Geneva. Selected in the Sustainable Luxury & Circular Innovation category, we pitched our Catalog & Pricing API alongside some of the world’s leading innovators in luxury, circularity, and technology.
It was a whirlwind experience with only 3 weeks’ notice, a 24-hour journey from Florida to Switzerland, two days of intense panels and pitching, then another 24 hours back.
Exhausting, yes. Worth it? Absolutely.
The Pitch: Making Resale & APIs Resonate
Each finalist had just five minutes to pitch–followed by a short Q&A–in front of an audience that included eBay executives, luxury brand leaders, and technology innovators.
Explaining a B2B API in five minutes, to an audience where some were CTOs and others had never heard of an API, was no small challenge. But the response was overwhelmingly positive. Afterwards, we spoke with marketplaces and brands who validated exactly what we’ve been building:
- Authentication is not the only problem in resale.
Too often, conversations focus only on authenticity checks. What's overlooked is product identification, cataloging, and pricing intelligence—areas where Trendful’s technology directly solves real pain points.
- Manual processes don't scale.
eBay shared that they still rely on manual teams to correct product titles, descriptions, and prices. Imagine scaling that across millions of listings. Our API automates this at speed and accuracy.
Big Themes at the Summit
1. Resale Is Now Core to Luxury
We were struck by how much focus resale received this year. Nearly half the panels touched on it. Luxury brands, long hesitant to embrace resale, are realizing it’s not a threat but an essential channel for sustainability, growth, and customer acquisition.
2. Customer Acquisition Through Resale
Gen Z often enters luxury through resale. A vintage Chanel bag bought secondhand may be the start of a lifelong loyalty to the brand. Resale is no longer a competitor to heritage—it’s a funnel.
3. Trust, Transparency, & Collaboration
Panelists repeated these words again and again. After a difficult year for luxury in 2024, brands must rebuild consumer trust. True sustainability isn’t just about materials—it’s about extending product lifecycles through resale.
4. Data Intelligence Is the Missing Piece
Brands know their primary sales data. What they lack is visibility into how their products perform in the secondary market. Trendful fills that gap: resale pricing, value retention, sell-through times, and even material durability insights.
What We Took Away
While we didn’t take home the trophy, the validation we received was more valuable:
- Trendful was cited in a panel on “Luxury’s Next Frontier: Scaling Heritage with Intelligence,” highlighting the importance of resale data in brand strategy.
- Multiple conversations confirmed what we already believed: standardized product taxonomy and pricing intelligence are essential infrastructure for resale.
- Brands and marketplaces alike are eager for tools—like AI-powered agents—that make resale data accessible even without deep tech teams.
Looking Ahead
We left Geneva inspired and more motivated than ever to continue building the data intelligence layer for resale.
For brands and marketplaces, resale isn’t just a sustainability checkbox; it’s a growth lever, a trust-builder, and a cultural bridge to new generations of customers.
At Trendful, our mission is to make resale scalable, transparent, and intelligent—because circular commerce is the future of luxury.
Are you a retailer, marketplace, or brand exploring resale? Let’s connect. We’d love to share how pricing intelligence and product data standardization can help you scale.