Patagonia Merges Used and New in One Cart — And the Outdoor Industry Is Watching
For years, buying a used Patagonia jacket online meant navigating to a separate website, a separate checkout, and a separate shipping process. That era ended on October 14, 2026. As of that date, Worn Wear's used inventory lives on Patagonia.com, where secondhand garments and new ones share a cart, a checkout, and sometimes a shipping box. It sounds like a minor UX tweak. It isn't. The move represents the most significant structural shift in outdoor gear retail in years — and it carries implications that reach well beyond a single brand's website.
What Actually Changed, and Why It Matters
Worn Wear has been around since 2017, quietly operating as its own digital storefront with a separate URL. Patagonia first launched its resale platform nine years ago, making it a pioneer in the brand-owned secondhand clothing space. The concept was strong from day one: customers trade in used Patagonia gear at retail stores, receive gift cards in exchange, and the returned items are cleaned, repaired, and relisted at a discount. But the program's reach was always constrained by the friction of having to go somewhere else to buy it.
Only about half of Patagonia customers were even aware that Worn Wear existed as an option. That number is remarkable when you consider how aggressively Patagonia markets its environmental mission. The platform was doing real volume — Worn Wear sold nearly 160,000 items and generated approximately $13 million in net sales during fiscal year 2026, while its team of more than 40 associates processed more than 230,000 items — but it was doing that volume with half its potential customer base completely unaware it existed. Fixing that wasn't a matter of marketing. It was a matter of placement.
It's the same site that runs Patagonia's end-of-season clearance sales, so used gear now reaches far more shoppers than a standalone resale site ever did. That's the core insight driving this decision. Patagonia.com draws millions of visits from people who are already pre-sold on the brand. Putting secondhand options directly in their line of sight — on the same product pages, in the same search results, accessible from the same cart — collapses the distance between intent and purchase.
The Technical Lift Behind the Scenes
Making this happen wasn't a weekend project. The project took four years to fully build. "Putting used [products] on a typical main e-comm platform is definitely fitting a round peg into a square hole," Brown notes. Standard e-commerce infrastructure is built around SKUs — standardized product codes that assume multiple identical units exist. Resale doesn't work that way. Every used item is a one-off, with its own specific condition, colorway, sizing, and photographic record. Building backend systems capable of handling that level of individuality at the scale of 40,000 concurrent listings required entirely custom engineering.
The site now carries around 40,000 items at a time, and Patagonia also pulled warehousing, shipping, and customer service back from an outside vendor and into its own warehouse in Reno, Nevada. That vertical integration of the logistics side came first — moving the storefront onto Patagonia.com is the last piece of that in-house shift. New Worn Wear listings drop every Wednesday, giving the platform a built-in refresh cycle that keeps repeat shoppers coming back.
A Unified Product Experience
If you look up a new item on the site, you'll see links to buy a used version when it's available. Previously, new-product pages linked to the separate Worn Wear site. That distinction matters more than it sounds. Before, finding a used version of a specific item required intentional effort — you had to want to look for it. Now, the used option surfaces automatically during normal shopping behavior. It's the difference between a sidebar ad and a product listing. One interrupts; the other informs.
Worn Wear enables customers to trade in eligible Patagonia gear for Patagonia gift cards, and every item is inspected by Patagonia employees for eligibility, authenticity, condition, functionality, and cleanliness before being accepted for resale. Trade-ins are available at Patagonia retail stores across the U.S. and through patagonia.com. That in-house quality control is what separates Worn Wear from third-party resale marketplaces. When you buy a used Nano Puff through Patagonia, a Patagonia employee has vetted it. That's a level of assurance that platforms like ThredUp or even eBay simply can't replicate.
An Industry First at Scale
Sam Brown, Patagonia's head of resale, told PopSci the company is one of the first in the U.S. to sell used and new items together at this scale. That "at this scale" qualifier is worth sitting with. Small brands with limited SKU counts have experimented with integrated resale before, but no outdoor or apparel company operating at Patagonia's volume has pulled off a fully unified storefront. Resale has become ubiquitous across fashion brands, but it typically happens separately from new sales. Patagonia's integration is the next step in making secondhand shopping the new norm.
Sam Brown said: "Our designers relentlessly focus on quality. We build products to be durable and timeless, and we back all new and used products with our warranty, the Ironclad Guarantee." That last line is significant. The same warranty that covers a brand-new $350 down jacket now covers a used one bought through Worn Wear. That's not a minor footnote — it's a fundamental reassurance that lowers the perceived risk of buying secondhand, and it's something no third-party reseller can offer.
Expansion Beyond U.S. Borders
For now, Worn Wear is only available to customers in the U.S., but Patagonia hopes to continue expanding this side of the business to Canada and the rest of the world. International expansion would be logistically complex — customs classifications for used goods vary by country, and the trade-in infrastructure that feeds Worn Wear's inventory depends on having enough physical retail locations to collect returned gear. But if the domestic integration performs as expected, the blueprint will be clear.
By bringing it to Patagonia's main website, the brand hopes to expand its market reach, especially among younger customers. That's the longer game here. A 25-year-old buying their first piece of Patagonia gear is more likely to start with a used Baggies at $30 than a new pair at $55. If that entry point leads to a decade-long relationship with the brand, the lifetime customer value math works strongly in Patagonia's favor — even if the initial transaction generates lower margin than a new sale.
Sport Climbing Makes History in the Verdon Gorge
On October 10, 2026, Austrian climber Jakob Schubert stood at the base of a 55-meter limestone wall in southern France's Verdon Gorge and did something no one in the history of sport climbing had ever done: he repeated a route graded 5.15d. For years, the grade of the five hardest climbs in the world — a difficulty level called 5.15d — remained unconfirmed, since only one person had climbed each one. That all changed on October 10 when Austrian climber Jakob Schubert, 35, became the second person to send the 5.15d DNA in France.
In climbing, a grade only becomes real when it gets confirmed. The sport operates like peer review in science: one person's assessment of a route's difficulty, no matter how accomplished that person is, remains a proposal until someone else climbs it and agrees. Schubert is one of only five climbers to have successfully completed a route currently considered to be graded 9c. None of the world's five 9c routes had been repeated before — until now. That's nearly a decade during which the hardest grade in sport climbing existed only in theory.
The Route: DNA in the Verdon Gorge
DNA is located in the Verdon Gorge in France, and is characterized by extreme overhang terrain and multiple difficult bouldering-style cruxes. French climber Seb Bouin bolted and first climbed the route in 2022, and his journey to sending the route — which involved over 250 attempts — appeared in the Reel Rock film series. Bouin spent 150 days working the line before he finally clipped the anchor. He long debated whether the route should be graded 9b+ or 9c. When he settled on 9c — the equivalent of 5.15d in American notation — the climbing world accepted the proposal with cautious excitement, knowing it would remain unverified until someone else got up the same wall.
That wait lasted four years. Since first trying DNA in 2024, Schubert has put in at least 30 days on the route spread across multiple trips. The DNA projecting experience, he said, was made far easier by Bouin's transparency and the footage of his first ascent. "We had the video from Seb, and he did a crazy job checking out the perfect beta for the route," Schubert said. "I had to change a few [pieces of beta] because I'm way shorter than him, but I could copy a lot of beta, which saved a lot of time."
The Grade Is Morphological — and That's the Point
DNA is not just hard — it is hard in a way that is unusually sensitive to body proportions. "It's a very morphological route," explained Schubert, who stands 5'9". "The shorter you are, the harder the route gets. At some point, it would probably be impossible. I'm only borderline tall enough." That characteristic complicates the grade confirmation in an interesting way. A climber four inches shorter than Schubert attempting the same line might effectively be attempting a different route — one that may not be physically possible given the reach requirements of certain holds.
Despite those caveats, since Schubert aligned with Bouin on his proposed grade, this makes DNA the world's first confirmed 5.15d route. The other four proposed 5.15d routes — including Schubert's own B.I.G., Adam Ondra's Silence in Norway where the grade originated in 2017, Sean Bailey's Duality of Man in Utah, and Jorge Díaz-Rullo's Café Colombia at Margalef — remain proposals. Schubert has tried every 5.15d except the newest line at the grade, and he told interviewers that DNA feels harder than his route B.I.G., and could be the hardest route at the grade.
180,000 People Watched It Happen Live
Unlike most elite sends, which are announced after the fact via social media, Schubert's ascent of DNA was streamed live on YouTube. On October 10th, the 35-year-old successfully completed the ascent of DNA in La Ramirole. As with his ascent of B.I.G. in Flatanger three years ago, the livestream was broadcast on Schubert's YouTube account — in the ninth live attempt. That number requires context: "Some people read 'ninth live attempt' on YouTube and think this is basically my ninth try on the route, which is obviously far from the truth," Schubert said. Between multiple multi-week trips to the Verdon over two years, the actual investment of effort behind those nine streamed attempts is staggering.
The audience for those nine attempts reached 180,000 concurrent viewers at peak — a number that would have been unthinkable for sport climbing viewership even a decade ago. The landmark accomplishment cements the difficulty of the climb and makes Schubert one of the most accomplished sport climbers of all time. With two 5.15ds to his name, he stands alone. With DNA, the 35-year-old Schubert has become both the first climber in history to repeat a proposed 5.15d route, as well as the first to climb two.
A Startup Wants to Sell You Protein at Cost — Here's How
The outdoor and athletic performance supplement market has a dirty secret: a significant portion of what you pay for protein powder, creatine, and greens goes not toward ingredients, but toward broker fees, distributor margins, retail markups, and brand advertising budgets that scale with influencer deals. A San Francisco startup called Aonic has decided to name that dynamic explicitly — and build an entire business model around eliminating it.
Supplement company Aonic is looking to disrupt the wellness industry with the launch of a new pricing model — without markups. Aonic Club, the company's just-launched membership model, will sell supplements to members at cost, with the brand generating revenue from the annual membership fees only. The concept borrows structural logic from Costco: pay a flat annual fee, access goods at or near wholesale pricing. But Aonic's version goes further, stripping out not just the retail layer but the brand layer itself.
The Numbers Don't Lie
The pricing comparisons Aonic publishes are the kind of thing that makes you rethink your supplement cabinet. The price of 30 servings of Aonic's all-in-one daily supplement solution and greens powder will be $18.70 for members, compared to competitors like AG1 at $54.67 and IM8 at $89. Its preworkout will cost just $10.27, compared to Ghost, a popular brand, at $44.99. And for hydration, a price comparison shared by Aonic shows its hydration sticks cost $9.35 for 30 units, while the equivalent Liquid I.V. product on Amazon costs $46.86 — an 80% difference.
Those gaps are real, and they reflect something the supplement industry has long counted on consumers not examining too closely: the distance between what a product costs to manufacture and what it costs on a retail shelf is enormous. Aonic makes the products itself and sells them direct. There's no brand tax, no retail layer, no ad budget baked into the price. AI handles sourcing and operations, so the company runs on a fraction of traditional overhead. That leaves the price as the sum of real costs: ingredients, blending, packaging, freight, and delivery.
The Membership Structure
Membership costs $99 the first year and $149 after — for the launch, Aonic offers the membership at a reduced rate of $49 for founding members for the first year. The first 10,000 members join at that $49 founding rate. The $149 renewal price and the company's savings claims are central to whether members see value, while shipping fees can apply below the $50 free-shipping threshold. That last detail is worth noting — the math changes depending on how much you actually order per month. Heavy supplement users who spend $80 or more per month are likely to come out well ahead. Lighter users will need to calculate more carefully.
Aonic's strategy relies on AI to improve sourcing and operations and eliminate markups for brokers, distributors, brands, and retailers. The company sources ingredients for its protein, creatine, electrolytes, and daily vitamins directly, controls its formulas and production, and then sells products online direct-to-consumer at cost. The club opens with Aonic's own protein and supplement line, made in the U.S.
Who Built It and Where They're Going
The San Francisco wellness startup was co-founded by fitness coach Senada Greca, Kim Kardashian's personal trainer, and entrepreneur Max Meier. Greca's community-facing credibility is central to the go-to-market strategy. "One of the questions I get most from my community is which products are actually worth the money," said Greca. "People trust my recommendations, and I take that seriously. I helped build Aonic to make products I'd use myself, at prices people could afford every day. With Aonic Club, members pay what the products cost and vote on what we make next."
The supplement line is only the beginning. Aonic plans to bring the same model to groceries, beauty, personal care, pet food, and household essentials — attacking categories worth about $1.5 trillion a year, no later than 2027. Whether that expansion is realistic at that timeline is a legitimate question. Building the sourcing infrastructure, quality control systems, and logistics for a new category of physical goods is a fundamentally different challenge each time. But supplements were a smart entry point: high margin at retail, high purchase frequency among the target demographic, and a consumer base already primed to question what they're paying for.
The Bigger Picture: Three Signals, One Direction
Taken individually, Patagonia's Worn Wear integration, Jakob Schubert's 5.15d confirmation, and Aonic's at-cost supplement club look like separate news items from different corners of the outdoor and performance world. But read together, they point toward something more coherent: the outdoor and athletic space is getting harder to bullshit.
Patagonia is betting that consumers will choose secondhand when the friction is removed. Schubert's ascent confirms that elite climbing grades are now subject to genuine peer review, at a level of transparency — streamed live to 180,000 people — that the sport has never seen before. And Aonic is betting that supplement buyers, given clear pricing information and a viable alternative, will stop tolerating markups that exist primarily to fund ad campaigns they've grown cynical about anyway.
The gear industry, the climbing world, and the performance nutrition market all operate on some degree of perceived value that exceeds actual value. Right now, across all three, that gap is getting scrutinized as never before. The brands and athletes who survive that scrutiny — whether because their products genuinely hold up, their grades genuinely check out, or their prices genuinely reflect what things cost — are the ones worth paying attention to.
