Secondhand gifts are going mainstream this holiday season

For most of history, holiday shopping came with an unspoken rule: Never give someone a used present. A preowned gift seemed cheap, or worse, thoughtless. But that taboo seems to be falling away. For most of its 17-year history, ThredUp, which bills itself as the world’s largest online thrift store, saw a dip in sales over the holidays, in contrast to most retailers, who wait for the glut of holiday shopping to finally turn a profit for the year. “We were the inverse of traditional...