Having already discussed ‘hype’ brands
(Supreme, Palace, etc) and the pros and cons that come with the experience of
reselling such brands, there is an alternative. Vintage, much like any form of
fashion, seems to come in and out of trend with little hint as to when it will
rise and when it will fall. Currently, vintage clothing is proving very popular
amongst young people meaning that you’re almost as likely to see someone
wearing a 10-year-old, slightly threadbare jumper as you are a brand new one.
This has created a whole new aspect to the experience of reselling and one that’s
probably a bit more welcoming.
Where with hype brands you’ll likely have
to queue outside a specific store for an eternity to get your hands on
something valuable, vintage clothing can be found almost anywhere. You could be
looking through some of your parents’ old clothes in the attic one day and come
across a retro Reebok jumper that’s definitely seen better days but could shift
online for a healthy 20 or 30 pounds, providing it’s not completely ruined.
Buyers of vintage clothing will do anything to get their hands on a bargain and
won’t mind spending £30 on a tea stained XL jumper just as long as it says
Tommy Hilfiger or Polo Sport in big letters on the front. People who resell
vintage clothing tend to rinse their local charity shops dry, hunting through
the rails hoping to see anything old and in decent condition. Finding that
vintage Tommy in a charity shop is like hitting the jackpot for vintage
resellers as charity shop prices mean they’ll only be spending a few pounds on
purchase but can expect a pretty penny online. Vintage resellers also tend to
venture out every couple of weeks to a vintage fair in the hunt for a bargain.
It’ll cost you something like £3 to get in but once you’re in, the search for
that slightly under-priced gem is on.
Once acquiring their stock, vintage
resellers will list their items online and the one place that’s proving more
popular than anywhere else at the moment is Depop.
Depop was founded in 2011, reaching 1.8
million downloads by 2014, and has been described as the love child of
Instagram and eBay among a variety of other things but is basically an online
marketplace similar to eBay where sellers post photographs of their items along
with a description and a price and await the arrival of other users to come
along and by their items. It is free to sign up and free to list items but
Depop does take 10% of the sale once an item is sold. It was mainly down to Depop
that the buy-to-sell phenomenon was born as it was able to take what eBay already
offered and add a social, Instagram feel to it. The Instagram influence shone
through so much so that people will, on occasion, post photos of themselves
wearing an outfit on Depop with no intention of selling any of it. They just
want to show it off. Compared to eBay which, despite its functionality, is a
place where you can be looking for a vintage jacket one day and a used dishwasher
the next. Described by Vogue as the ‘Millennial-friendly shopping app’ Depop built
on the already present online second-hand market and applied an easy-to-use,
trendy twist that completely changed the way young people choose to shop. I
went online and surveyed a group of 18-23 year olds on how they buy their
clothes to find out for myself just how real this phenomenon is. Here are the
results.
I also asked people to comment on what
their preferred marketplace was and found that Depop was most popular with eBay
and Asos tying for second. Despite it looking like a low figure, 28% of people
saying they usually buy second hand clothes is still a fairly large number considering
second-hand clothing is stereotypically associated with someone’s unwanted
hand-me-down. The survey emphasises the popularity among young people of
shopping online and using marketplaces like Depop, making the idea of starting
your own online shop seem evermore worthwhile.
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