It seems like there is nothing you can’t do from your phone these days. If you told a college student twenty years ago that they could be making some pocket money without leaving their dorm they would’ve thought, “That’s hot.” And, it’s still hot today.
Sustainability is quickly rising as a trend in fashion, and there’s no better way to shop sustainably than to head to your local thrift store—here at The New School we have Beacon’s Closet and Buffalo Exchange. The majority of secondhand clothing stores in Manhattan stock their inventory with their customers’ old treasures. It’s a pretty simple business plan: you haul a bag of lightly worn clothing to a buyer and they select the pieces that are most likely to sell in the store. The seller gets part of the profit, but it’s usually only about 30 percent of the selling price in cash or 50 percent in store credit.
In the digital age, there’s a more efficient way to make bank selling your old clothes. Enter Depop, which launched in Milan back in 2011. When you make a sale on Depop, you get to keep 60 percent of the profit.
“Places like Beacon’s tend to purchase second-hand items with a very narrow vision of a customer in mind,” said Molly Alexander, a sophomore in the Strategic Design and Management program at Parsons. She began selling on Depop about two years ago when she wanted to get rid of clothes she no longer wanted. Check out her Depop store Celestial Cyber.
Quickly, her shop became more curated and less of a closet cleanout. “My focus shifted when I started finding unique vintage pieces on my thrifting outings,” she said. “Rather than keep them for myself, I wanted to share items to start new trends based on what I was observing in the streets of New York.”
Most shops on Depop are targeted towards a certain customer. This seems to help sellers make a bigger profit on the items they find on a thrifting trip.
First-year Fashion Design student Aliya Hidirlar says she hunts for pieces that she knows her customers expect from her shop. You can check out her pieces here.
“I tend to curate my shop for my clients based on what sells and what doesn’t,” she said. But, before you start curating your own shop, Hidirlar recommends you do your research.
“There are transaction fees and shipping if you decide to ship out a piece for a customer,” she said. Although, there are some upsides for her! She choses Depop over traditional brick and mortar thrift stores because you make a bigger profit from your Depop sales.
“Beacon’s and Buffalo are the types of places I go to get rid of clothes fast,” she said. But, others think that going to a storefront to sell items is a more lengthy process than selling online.
“There’s no need to go all the way to Beacon’s or Buffalo Exchange and risk them not taking your items,” said Andrea Bedoya, a second-year student studying Economics and Environmental Studies. Selling on Depop is worth it to Bedoya “because you are able to do it out of the comfort of your own home.”
Like most sellers, Bedoya notes the detrimental impact that the fashion industry leaves on the environment.
“Selling on Depop is a great way to save clothes from a landfill and an easy way to make some side cash.” The environment is one thing that made her want to sell her old things on her Depop shop, linked here. She even encourages her buyers (right in her store’s bio) to opt for local pickups in the city rather than shipping because of its impact on the environment.
“I began selling because I had so many shoes and clothes that I wasn’t wearing,” she said. “I wanted to give them a new life.”
It’s better to have cash in your pocket than clothes in a landfill. As the 2020 version of Regina George would say: Log in, loser. We’re going shopping!