Amidst rising stakeholder expectations and recent disruptive events, manufacturing firms are re-evaluating strategies, focusing on sustainability and resilience. Operations managers face a resource allocation challenge balancing these priorities.

This conceptual paper delves into sustainable resilience, exploring the relationships between congruent operations, network capabilities, and sustainable firm performance, considering uncertainty and sequential capability-building. Through a conceptual literature review, this paper presents a conceptual model and associated hypotheses, laying the groundwork for an extensive empirical study.

Building on the cumulative capability theory, we provide a nuanced perspective on the traditional Sand Cone model, emphasising sequence testing of operations and network capabilities. This approach paves the way for a multi-dimensional understanding of sustainable resilience. Addressing paradoxical tensions from trade-offs, our model outlines a path for subsequent research, aiming to guide firms through the journey of multiple priorities in today's volatile environment.

Secondary trading of clothing can support the transition to the circular economy by prolonging the lifespan of products through reuse. From a consumer point of view, second-hand consumption promotes a reduction in first-hand purchasing. From a company point of view, resale allows to take care of end-of-life products, according to the increasing environmental responsibilities requested to manufacturers, but also to monetize with left-over products, overstock, and returned goods. Indeed, resale models offer the chance to take control over a product’s lifecycle and to dispose of slow-moving inventory, unsold products at the end of the season, and returns with sustainability-focused solutions.

With the growing interest in re-commerce, firms have increasingly entered this market over the last decade, anyway, it proved to be both expensive and logistically challenging for brands used to sell only new items. The objective of this exploratory study is to analyze the end-of-life product management of luxury companies. Specifically, through multiple case studies based on semi-structured interviews of businesses operating in the luxury second-hand market, we explore the strategic partnership developed by companies and second-hand trading platforms to manage used products or returns and embrace circular economy.

The results will show how resale can be both an environmental opportunity to embrace circularity and an economical one. Managerial insights of this research will guide managers towards practices to promote efficient logistic coordination and achieve cost-minimizing and profit-maximizing, which are the key factors used in determining processing options for returned and unsold goods.