WASHINGTON — If you’re looking for fashion bargains, look no further than the palm of your hand.
Consignment shopping has gone mobile.
“Pretty much at the disposal of my fingertips, I can literally upload a shirt I want to sell, give it a description, and a price. Within minutes it’s live for thousands of people to see,” says Jennifer Jandris, a program assistant from Arlington, Virginia who sells clothes through Poshmark, a mobile platform for buying and selling clothes.
“That’s really different from going into a bricks-and-mortar store, ”Jandris says.
Typically, a person who wanted to sell items would have to make an appointment with a consignment shop, in which they would have to physically bring in clothes and accessories for appraisal.
If they wanted to sell them online, eBay and Amazon were the main options.
Now, startups are changing they way consumers buy and sell secondhand clothes. Tech companies are trying to streamline the process of buying and selling, offering cash and convenience in exchange. The move has been described as a shift from e-commerce, what’s being called “m-commerce.”
“[Mobile] works with people’s lives. It’s the most convenient way,” said Ryan Russikoff, business development manager with Rebagg.
Rebagg is a platform that specializes in reselling high-end, designer handbags — think Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Hermès. The bags are vetted for authenticity before they are placed for sale on Rebagg’s sister site, Trendlee. Russikoff said they’re offering a better alternative for the “thousands” of bags sitting in the back of women’s closets, collecting dust.
“The luxury resale industry, specifically online, is just starting. We’re going to get all these bags by making it simple and easy for clients,” Russikoff said.
Poshmark began as a mobile-based platform in 2011 with ease and simplicity in mind, as well. A company spokewsoman said there are now 1.5 million women who sell on Poshmark.
Co-founder Tracy Sun says the company sees itself as a tech firm that is leveraging consumers’ existing social networks to spread influence and brand awareness — and to sell clothes.
“These women already have influence with their peers,” Sun said. “They don’t want to be advertised to. They want recommendations.”
Poshmark recently made a deal with more than 60 designers, who will offer goods at wholesale prices to the app’s top sellers.
Jandris says this has made selling on a consignment lucrative venture.
“I’ve actually turned this to an entire business,” Jandris said.
She has nearly 260,000 followers and has more than 1,630 items listed in her Poshmark “closet,” where people can like and share what they’re into.
The buying experience on these apps isn’t that different from purchasing from eBay or Amazon. But the array of services offered by these virtual consignment shops varies.
Some companies will ship the goods for you, while others will send over boxes and pre-addressed shipping labels and leave you to handle the mailings. Some services will photograph and post items online on a seller’s behalf, while others leave that to the person selling the goods.
Commissions on sold goods averaged between 20 percent to 25 percent, though not all services allow sellers you to set their own prices.
Most of the two dozen so physical, D.C.-area consignment shops surveyed for this story had some form of online shopping available to consumers. But the vast majority required in-store appointments for those seeking to sell clothes on consignment.
Some physical stores offered downloadable mail-in kits from their websites and offered to pay for shipping. Georgetown-based Ella Rue, for example, allows potential sellers to submit forms from its website, where the shop also hosts occasional virtual auctions.
That said, some of the web- and app-based businesses are making connections with bricks-and-mortar shops. Snobswap, for example, is like a virtual a hub for consignment shops. Last year, online consignor thredUP partnered with Target, offering store credit to individual sellers who obtained “Clean Out Kits” for purging unwanted clothes.
Swap.com customer engagement specialist Kelley Gerdis says the future of consignment shopping is definitely mobile. Swap is a subsidiary of the Finland-based Netcycler, an online service that facilitated trading and giving items away for free. The company is working on a mobile app that it hopes to roll out this year.
Swap, whose warehouses are based in suburban Chicago, began as a consignment shop for kids clothes, toys and games. It has since expanded to offer womenswear and plans to offer menswear soon.
Gerdis says demand for these web-based sopping and selling services are being driven by an increasingly more eco-friendly consumer base, folks who are trying to extend the life cycle of everything — even old clothes.
“Why do they have to go to a landfill when they can go to someone else’s house?”
