What If Fashion Didn't End at Checkout?
Emerging Voices || As resale grows outside brand ecosystems, Melissa McDermott is building the infrastructure to bring value back to the industry.
Resale is growing at double digits. Yet much of that opportunity exists outside brand ecosystems. Brands invest heavily in acquisition, only to lose product visibility, consumer data, and margin continuity the moment checkout is complete.
The industry has entered a moment of reckoning. As The Business of Fashion founder Imran Amed recently told IFM graduates in Paris, “The most radical thing you can do in fashion is practice restraint. Growth has become a proxy for relevance — but the result wasn’t abundance. It was dilution.”
If growth alone no longer signals strength, then value must be reconsidered. Not just at the moment of sale, but across the entire lifecycle of a product.
Melissa McDermott has spent more than two decades inside global fashion brands and technology infrastructure. Having worked across merchandising, design, sourcing, and digital transformation for companies ranging from Gap Inc. to Kering and Mango, she has seen how value is built, and how quickly it disappears once a product leaves the store.
With Reclaim, she is building what she describes as circularity as infrastructure: designed to extend value beyond checkout, reconnect brands to their products, and reframe purchases to assets, giving both brands and consumers a way to manage the product’s next life.
TL;DR: what you’ll miss if you stop reading here
Fashion’s resale economy is expanding rapidly, yet much of its growth happens outside brand control. Reclaim integrates at point of sale, allowing consumers to track and recover value from their purchases while enabling brands to retain visibility, revenue, and data beyond the first transaction. By connecting post-purchase behavior to product and consumer intelligence, Melissa McDermott positions circularity as a structural evolution in how fashion defines ownership, value, and data.
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