An industry has developed around the online resale of clothes | Hacker News Reader

An industry has developed around the online resale of clothes

1843magazine.com

63 pointsfern1220 comments

My wife has a website[0] selling vintage items to Japan that she finds in flea markets, eBay, classifieds, charity shops etc. Mostly fabrics and kitchen stuff rather than fashion items though. Pretty good profit margins on each item, but it's very labor-intensive. Every item is unique, so it takes time to takes photos, upload, write a description ... Once it's sold, most of this effort is gone and you need to move on to the next item.

In that sense, I imagine teenagers might have time and energy for this kind of sales process. The big money is made by those online portals and apps, rather than the sellers.

[0] https://www.frau-vintage.com

Probably an effect of promoting it here, but the page is currently awfully slow.

After load it really does look good - even for me not being able to read Japanese.

Thanks for letting me know. The site is hosted in Singapore to be closer to Japan, and it should load faster from there. But I'll see if I can optimize some stuff (the technology behind it is rather boring, just wordpress with woocommerce).

Just as a heads up, you seem to be loading an 800KB password strength estimation script on the homepage: https://www.frau-vintage.com/wp-includes/js/zxcvbn.min.js (which unlike the other scripts, is not coming from the CDN and not compressed).

Thanks a lot :) it probably came with the theme (I updated the entire website about a month ago using a commercial theme)... I definitely have some work to do to optimize. Wordpress isn't my regular stack, but I'll dig in and tweak a few things. Really appreciate the heads up.

One of the most surreal moments of my life involved traveling to Japan in the early 2000's and encountering a t-shirt from my high school at a clothing resale shop.

On a trip to South Korea more than 10 years ago, I was in a "hip" clothing store with my wife's cousins. We found a shelf of hats that said "Mount Cabot Lodge" + my home town & state.

My home town has ~15000 people, is not really famous for anything and there's no "Mount Cabot Lodge". Mt Cabot is actually ~200mi away. I figure someone threw a dart at a map of the US and used that to pick the town. I regret not buying it.

Afaik the market for second hand women's clothing is big in Japan on Mercari (the only startup there with a >$1B valuation iirc). Maybe that's a viable additional growth channel for her to reach an audience that's not finding the web store front.

The downside I think is that users on said app are conditioned to expect pretty steep discounts.

Thanks for the tip. I asked my wife and she said that Mercari doesn't allow sellers outside Japan (or at least didn't use to).

According to my wife, this seems to be quite common for platforms to insist on sellers operating from within Japan, and buyers expecting local delivery. Since we live in Berlin, and sell from there, it makes those things tricky some times. We'll look into it though.

They do now. My wife(Ohio) has sold plenty of things from there.

https://www.mercari.com/help_center/article/163/ W-9 and 1099 are US specific tax forms

I saw that they now operate in Japan, US and UK. We're based in Germany, so not sure whether we can technically use it...

It is a huge business. My mom has sold thousands of dollars worth of clothes online after she lost weight (just don't ask my dad how much she originally paid for all of it).

This was tried in the first dot-com boom. It was called Tradeweave. They were trying to make a market in excess clothing sold off by retailers. That didn't work out.

This is more like eBay - an army of poor schlubs doing all the work while the advertising site takes a cut.

Yes, all those things are interesting to read and spot on. What I need is 1. the person to set up the fast fabulous web site, 2. the person to take the photos, 3. the person to write up the blurbs (could combine 2 and 3) and 4 the person to keep track, package and post out the items. It is all very well to talk about mom and pop stores, but part of the problem is not necessarily lack of understanding etc. but lack of time and energy and money to pay for it. Very hard to combine bricks and mortar and internet in this business without employing people with enthusiasm and expertise. If you are covering outgoings in small business today you are doing well. Making money is the next level!

https://www.trendsales.dk/?ref=www.trendsales.com an original Danish fashion blog turned into a marketplace for used fashion clothes got bought some years back still doing really well and expanding.

Reminds me of StockX - so-called “Stock Market of Things” that was launched a few years ago. StockX, however, deals only in unworn/unused sneakers and streetwear.

The secret is buying from goodwill and reselling online. It's a great side hustle and easy.

Aha, so another case of arbitrage between old-school brick-and-mortar merchants and Internet sales. People make their living visiting mom-and-pop stamp dealers (or coin dealers, or used bookstores), run by old guys who don't get the "Internet" thing, buy up suitable inventory, and re-sell on the web. It works especially well when, for example, a stamp dealer in small town U.S.A. has a stock of French stamps (French coins, rare French books). Locals aren't interested in French stamps, but if you sell on the Internet, you can find buyers in France.

My sister does this. She makes a few thousand a month selling stuff on ebay that she picks out of the bins at Goodwill in Portland.

I went up there for Christmas to help automate her workflow. She was doing it on Gen 1 Surface which was less than ideal. So I gave her my old computer. She actually likes digging through the bins looking for gems. It is just listing them on eBay that is pain since she has to wash the stuff and then take pictures and write up a description and list things.

She has a good eye. I went to the bins with with her and she would pull out a pair of yoga pants and say should could get 60 bucks for them. And she did.

So there is a bit of skill involved. But she consistently makes a nice chunk of change and I would say about 95% of what she lists get sold.

As a buyer I found that the key is to find a seller who specialises in items that were originally good quality and high ticket prices. For example there's a UK company called Rohan who make outdoor/adventure/travel clothing, it's great gear but eye watering prices. However on Ebay it's relatively easy to find sellers of this gear and, because the stuff is good quality, older items are still perfectly servicable ( even waterproofs ). Also I think that the better quality manufacturers will have more consistent sizing which makes buying easier.

Personally I prefer Rohan's older designs as I think that they're more practical which is even better because they're cheaper! These days all my walking gear, other than boots, comes from Ebay.

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