It all started with a £3 top. The jumper – size 10, excellent used condition – was from &Other Stories and, based on similar items online, may have cost at least £50 new. I spotted it in my local Salvation Army shop. Upon trying it on at home and realising it didn’t fit quite as I wanted, I became curious: how much money would the top fetch on Vinted?
More in hope than expectation, and keen to recoup my £3, I uploaded photos to my Vinted account, listed it for £9, and waited. It sold within hours. I was, unexpectedly, £6 up.
The success of apps such as Vinted, Depop, and eBay has made reselling a viable option for anyone good at sniffing out and selling on a bargain.
While most use these apps to sell their own unwanted clothes, others make a profit from scouting out steals in charity shops and car boot sales, bumping the prices up and flogging them online. The apps are user friendly – you can do it all from a phone – and favour sellers, who don’t have to pay fees to trade.
Intrigued and nursing my £6 profit, I decided to try my hand at reselling, taking the money earned and reinvesting it into “stock” to see what I could make in a month.
I set myself some parameters. First, I decide I’ll only shop in charity shops and at car boot sales. Some resellers also use auctions or buy wholesale pallets of unwanted clothes to hawk, but to me, a mere beginner, this felt excessive. I also resolved to only buy items I’d wear myself, reasoning that, if they don’t sell, I’d just keep them.
The experience of shopping to resell is liberating. I’ve never really been one for brands but I know labels sell so I seek out ones that, typically, do well: Zara, &Other Stories, Hush, Monki, Topshop, COS and Whistles.
I flick past anything on the rails that screams fast fashion, like Shein, Primark and Misguided because the resale value of these brands, in my experience, is minimal.
I also consider seasons, ignoring light, bright summer dresses and instead hunting down items like jumpers and jackets that are suitable for autumn.
I feel like a fashion buyer as I picture the type of person who shops on resale apps, imagining a woman in her late 20s or early 30s who likes a bargain and follows trends. I think about what she’d want to buy; what she may have been influenced by.
I learn quickly that charity shops are not a reseller’s friend. Volunteers are far more savvy than they once were – helped in part by the reselling apps themselves. Staff often search for brands on the apps and use the listed prices to inform what they charge in store.
Bargains are hard to come by and I put my (embarrassingly extensive) knowledge of Vinted to good use here – a Zara dress for £9 in a Cancer Research store, for example, isn’t going to fetch that on an app where the buyer also has to pay postage and a protection fee.
Car boot sales are where the real gems are, especially if you’re prepared to haggle. It’s here that I find most of my items over the course of the month: a Weekday denim jacket (£2); a cropped Nike running jacket (£2); a faux leather Zara dress (50p); a Love To Dream newborn swaddle (£2); and a floral Whistles midi dress (£5).
I search Vinted before reaching for my purse, checking to see what similar items are listed for in order to gauge whether a profit can, indeed, be made.
My first sale is exhilarating. It’s the Weekday denim jacket: fawn, slightly oversized, good used condition and sold for £10 on Vinted. I’m chuffed. With very little effort, I’ve made a 400pc profit. The Love To Dream swaddle sells quickly, too – another £8 profit – but my other items don’t do quite as well.
Having had high hopes for the Nike jacket, it sits, stagnant, on my various accounts as I steadily, begrudgingly, reduce the price. I think I was taken in by the brand. I also fall foul, on occasion, of not checking items properly.
A quick Google search informs me that the Whistles dress I bought for £5 and hoped to sell for more than £20 should have come with a belt. I list it anyway at £12 and have had interest but no sale yet.
A lesson, there, in checking items thoroughly and assessing whether any damage is salvageable. (Some is: a stain I spot on a Reiss top picked up in a charity shop sale for £2 comes out easily and I sell it on for £5.)
My overheads are negligible – I recycle Tesco bags to parcel items up and fit delivery journeys around my daily trips out, saving money on petrol. Timewise, of course, it does cost. I need time to scour charity shops and poke through car boot sales, time that’s hard to come by given I have a toddler and a baby.
It also takes time to take appealing photos, although listing the items themselves is easy to fit in while breastfeeding. It’s a slow, unpredictable process, too – items can sit for weeks without selling and then be snapped up quickly and unexpectedly.
So how much profit did I make? Well, by the end of the month, I come out with a gross profit of £38. That’s a 350pc increase on the £3 I spent on the original top. My net profit, though, currently stands at only £13.50 as I have reinvested £24.50 back into “stock” of which I still have £13.50 left to sell.
And while the percentage rises are impressive, the earnings themselves are still pretty small fry. Maybe some work is needed on my business model. Investing in fewer, higher end goods, perhaps? Or trying to shift cheaper items quicker?
It’s unlikely I’ll be giving up the day job, then, but I suspect I’ll still dabble occasionally. Although reselling might not make me my millions, it may very well help fund my own secondhand shopping habit.
Chloe is selling her wares on Vinted with the username chloeahamilton.
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