The Year of Uncertainty: Fashion’s Future Hinges on Resilience

2025 will be remembered as the year the fashion industry stopped pretending it could outrun uncertainty. McKinsey’s latest State of Fashion report captures the mood with unusual clarity: geopolitical tension, tariff volatility, and fragile consumer confidence have converged into a kind of global fog. And fashion – an industry built on seasonality and long lead times – is feeling that fog more intensely than most.

But what the report hints at, and what industry conversations increasingly confirm, is that this uncertainty does not fall evenly. It discriminates. Regional exposure, supply-chain structure, and business model fragility now determine whether a company merely stumbles or risks structural decline.

Regional Resilience

Consider two similar businesses: an Italian boutique and a Canadian vintage seller. A boutique in Italy sourcing primarily within the EU single market can shield itself from tariff shocks. Its supply chain, though not invulnerable, is buffered by regional trade stability and shorter transport routes. But a Canadian vintage seller whose primary market is the United States faces a totally different reality: the border is both lifeline and vulnerability. When tariffs shift – or when the threat of tariffs shifts – the entire model destabilizes. U.S.-Canada apparel duties have fluctuated repeatedly in recent years, and proposed increases regularly cause price uncertainty. Prices change, margins swing, and customers hesitate. The same garment, the same seller, the same audience – but a completely different exposure profile. These attributes give small European brands a resilience that exporters dependent on a fluctuating border simply cannot replicate. Reuters’ reporting on Italian leather and apparel exporters facing tariff risk underlines this: the same product and brand can face wildly different risk profiles depending on trade exposure. This asymmetry is now a defining feature of the global fashion economy.

Within this uneasy landscape lies an uncomfortable truth: uncertainty is itself a forcing function. It accelerates the shift toward domestic markets, strengthens the business case for local manufacturing (restoring), and pushes domestic resale from an ethical side-story to a strategic pillar. In a world where new imports are more expensive and shipping timelines less predictable, second-hand becomes not just sustainable but economically rational.

At the platform level, market signals are already shifting: resale demand is accelerating as protectionist policies and price inflation make new garments more expensive. Reports from ThredUp show resale growing far faster than the broader apparel market this year – evidence that domestic and circular supply chains are becoming more valuable assets.

Strategic Resilience: A Secnd Perspective as Co-Founder and COO

For fashion-tech firms like Secnd, which build software for resellers whose inventory often crosses borders, the new reality points toward a single imperative: regionalize early. The unpredictability of trade policy and shipping costs directly affects customer acquisition, revenue forecasts, and even product design.

Growth used to mean scaling globally; today, it means building region-specific strategies, segmenting price models, and acknowledging that “one-size-fits-all” expansion is no longer feasible. Even major platforms like Vinted and Vestiaire have begun introducing region-specific policies, fees, and logistics partnerships, in a direct response to geopolitical tensions. It means planning for longer sales cycles and more cautious purchasing decisions. F Echoed in McKinsey’s CEO survey: uncertainty, not demand, is the top constraint on 2025 growth expectations.

Working with Italian vintage shop owners has shown me how much strength lies in deep local knowledge – supplier relationships, pricing tuned to neighborhood purchasing power, and logistics designed to avoid cross-border dependencies.

So what should less software-first startups do?

Build market-by-market: Treat each country like a distinct organism with its own tariff exposure, logistics reality, and consumer spending rhythm. Launch product-market fits, pricing strategies, and fulfillment playbooks with a clear plan rather than betting on simultaneous global scale.
Model revenues with scenario splits by market (best/worst/base) and make your go-to-market conditional on local tariff and logistics risk.
Design products for resilience: offer modular onboarding for sellers, local returns and grading rules, and flexible fulfillment options so a spike in duties or border delays doesn’t break cash flows. Retail analysts and trade reporting confirm that firms treating markets as distinct – not identical – will outperform when policy noise is high.

These are not just theoretical moves; they follow directly from conversations in Milan with shop owners who prize predictability over scale and from Secnd’s early lessons: tailoring offerings by market reduces churn, makes forecasts more realistic, and turns tariff risk into an operational advantage rather than a fatal flaw. For instance, Italian sellers often prefer different payout structures and grading standards than Canadian or U.S. sellers.

Takeaways

The question, as we head into 2026, is not whether the fog will lift – but who will be prepared when it does. The brands, exporters, and platforms that survive this period will be those that treat uncertainty not as a temporary inconvenience but as the new operating environment.

Those who regionalize, diversify supply chains, and tailor offerings to the geopolitical map will find resilience where others see risk. Fashion has never lacked creativity. Now it must apply that creativity to its own survival.

By Eduard Härtel

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