The Korean outdoor apparel industry is shifting its competitive focus from new product sales to full product lifecycle management. Against the backdrop of a rapidly expanding buyback and refurbished resale market, major brands have spent the past year or two ramping up repair services, secondhand trading, and recyclable design.

One piece of evidence for this trend is platform data. According to Korean media reports, MUSINSA (무신사) launched its recommerce service "MUSINSA Used" in August 2025. Sellers pack their items into dedicated bags and send them off, after which the platform handles pickup, quality inspection, photography, listing, sales, and delivery, with online applications and courier pickups replacing in-store collection bins. About two weeks after launch, the number of seller applications surpassed 10,000, and more than 60,000 items were submitted for inspection. By June 2026, the seller base had grown roughly 30-fold compared with the first month after launch, and the number of items on sale had increased more than 6.7-fold; at a promotional event that June, a 9,900-won secondhand fashion item sold out in 11 seconds for the first unit, with stock cleared in one minute. Offline, the MUSINSA Outlet Lotte Mall Eunpyeong store, which opened in March this year, lets consumers inspect items in person before buying, drawing more than 250,000 cumulative visitors as of July.

At the brand level, the scale is even larger. Kolon FnC handles about 250,000 repair requests a year for its own products across national stores, specialized service centers, and online channels, with the Kolon Sport single brand accounting for about 130,000 a year—more than half. The company started repair work in 1987 with a customer service office, established specialized service centers in Anyang and Busan in 2018, and launched the upcycling brand RE;CODE in 2012, disassembling and reassembling inventory clothing that would otherwise be discarded or incinerated, while also offering MOL (Memory of Love), a one-on-one remake service for customers' old clothes; in 2022, it partnered with resale solutions company Madeleine Memory to launch the secondhand trading platform "OLO Relay Market," buying old clothes from customers for resale and returning Kolon Mall points. In the first half of 2026, transaction value on the platform grew about 4.4-fold compared with the early days after its launch in the second half of 2022, the number of brands involved expanded from 19 to 176 including external brands, and participating sellers increased about 5- to 6-fold from the first year. Repair services expanded online in 2024 and can now be requested on Kolon Mall and the Kolon Sport official website; in July this year OLO Relay Market launched a standalone app, and in the second half of the year it will strengthen integration with Kolon Mall.

Patagonia Korea goes further—its "Quality Lab" in Seoul's Parnas Mall repairs even other brands' clothing for free. When it opened in July 2025, it repaired about 20 items a day on average, with a reservation wait of about one month. Its official "One Wear Story" column has documented multiple cases, including a backpack purchased in Japan that could not get proper service in Korea having its zipper and Velcro repaired, and a down jacket and pants that could not be sent for repair because the brand had withdrawn from the Korean market. Currently, each account is limited to once a month and up to two items per visit, and some categories such as footwear, knitwear, and leather are not accepted; as of September 11 this year, seam sealing is provided only for Patagonia's own products. The U.S. market has a mechanism for buying back old clothes at a discount and reselling them, but Korea does not operate one for now.

The North Face carries out repairs and used-product buyback and resale mainly in the U.S., and its official website says it repairs about 40,000 items a year. Its "Renewed" program handles buyback and resale, and parent company VF disclosed that in fiscal 2025 more than 96,000 items were sold through the program in the U.S. and U.K. In the U.S., customers return used The North Face products to stores or by mail and can receive $10, $30, or $50 in shopping credit depending on the category; resellable items are inspected, cleaned, and repaired before being sold through the Renewed channel, while the rest are recycled or donated. The North Face has also set a goal: by 2030, 10% of the polyester and nylon it uses will be switched to "textile-to-textile" recycled materials made from waste textiles.

ARC'TERYX, meanwhile, has moved the recycling step forward into design. On August 26 this year it released "System 0," covering use, repair, and recycling and reuse after end of life; the first product is the multisport hardshell "Sperro SV," which went on sale September 4 at ARC'TERYX stores worldwide and the official online store. The brand launched the "ReBIRD" program in 2021, carrying out repairs, trade-in buybacks, resale, and upcycling, and its 2024 Climate Report shows that in 2024 it repaired 28,147 garments globally, up 39% year on year. The ReBIRD team took part in developing the Sperro SV, which supports more than 80 repair methods from patches to large-area panel replacement, and offers unlimited out-of-warranty repair support within three years of purchase; when a product can no longer be repaired, non-nylon components such as zippers and elastic cords are first separated from the nylon, and the recovered fabric undergoes chemical recycling to extract nylon, which Aquafil then regenerates into ECONYL yarn.

From platforms to brands, the industry is linking "repair, sell, collect, remake" into a single chain. Such measures both extend the service life of individual products and provide a stable source for material recycling of waste textiles, though whether they can work at scale still depends on repair capacity, recycling costs, and consumer participation.

Source: 아웃도어, 수선·리세일서 원료 회수까지…‘제품 생애주기’ 경쟁 · Originally published 2026-09-15