Consignment Startups Win By Breaking The Rules Of Retail

After reading Marie Kondo’s iconic The Life–Changing Magic of Tidying Up — which she says she “hated” — Bethany, 29, who lives in Queens, felt the need to purge her closet. She started using ThredUp to dispose of the clothes she no longer wanted, and has since sold five bags of apparel. This isn’t one of those stories where she’s now a millionaire — she’s made less than $200 — but that doesn’t mean ThredUp doesn’t serve a purpose. Bethany finds ThredUp appealing in part because she lives in New York City: Lugging bags of items to Buffalo Exchange on the seemingly cursed subway is just downright annoying, especially if her items won’t sell. She concedes she’s a “lazy shopper” and therefore prefers to shop online — and the prices on ThredUp tend to be lower than Buffalo Exchange, she explains. Bethany’s experience is one more piece of evidence suggesting that online shopping is eliminating the need to ever have to look a cashier in the face again. Welcome to what can best be described as Consignment 2.0: a deal-loving, Kondo-reading millennial woman’s paradise. The rise of chic online consignment shops such as ThredUp, social network and selling platform Poshmark, luxury platform The RealReal, Vestiaire Collective, and other competitors falls right in line with the rise of online shopping and the gold rush of venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. The conceit isn’t new (hello, eBay), but the branding is: They position themselves as modern technology companies — the antithesis of what you might imagine when you think of buying used apparel. Oh, and you can do it in the comfort of your sweatpants. Read more at Racked.