- Business Insider spoke with entrepreneurs who buy and resell clothing and sneakers for a living.
- The key to providing profitable products is to focus on and understand your customer.
- As for the items used at home, don’t expect to find them every day, but ‘they’re out there’.
Buying and reselling items can be an effective way to bring in extra cash – and it could even be your ticket to financial independence.
Val Zapata, 27, turned her hobby of collecting sneakers into a side hustle during Covid and, eventually, a full-time gig. She left from living wage paycheck to make millions selling sneakers on a direct selling platform, having savings for the first time in her life and buying her first home.
Richard S., who prefers not to share his last name for privacy reasons, began reselling items from his closet on eBay after losing his job in 2008. He gradually built a seven-figure eBay store that allowed him to retire at age 40. Business Insider verified each of their revenue claims.
Successful reselling starts with providing profitable products. Experts share their top tips, including how they landed their best deals.
1. Niche down
By drilling down, you can become an expert in your category, be it apparel, sneakers, jewelry, or sports gear, and understand what nuances interest customers.
In the early days of her sneaker-flipping business, Zapata says she stuck to what she knew best, which was retro Jordan sneakers: “We didn’t go away. I didn’t sell Nike SB until maybe six months ago, because I didn’t understand what a Nike SB really was, so we stayed within our framework of what we knew and what our customer liked.
Richard also found success by focusing on a specific category: pre-owned clothing.
He listed hundreds of different items to figure out what sells and what doesn’t. That helped him develop his overall strategy for buying “key issues,” which he defines as brands like Nike, Lululemon and Ralph Lauren that people wear every day. “I’m not going out to buy Gucci. I’m not buying Louis Vuitton. I’m buying everyday value items that everyone can afford. It’s a much bigger market.”
2. Understand your customers and what they want
Finding items based on data will help you avoid the common mistake of buying what you personally like and assuming other people will too. In the resale business, “it doesn’t matter what I think is good,” Richard said. “What matters is what the customer thinks is good.”
To understand what customers want, he spent time browsing the “sold items” section of eBay every day. Pay attention: “What sells for a big price?” he advised. “What’s selling for a big speed? Because you can’t throw garbage, for lack of a better term, and expect a great result.”
Richard S. inside his thrift store, The Spot, in Coral Springs, Florida. Courtesy of Richard S.
Zapata points out that you can’t get the right source until you really know your customer. She’s not selling to “the 13-year-old who borrowed his mom’s card,” she noted. Instead, it’s “the mom who wants to make a logical decision that won’t have buyer’s remorse.”
Knowing her typical customer helps her stay focused when sourcing. For example, “We don’t want beaters,” she said, referring to shoes that are somewhat worn. “We don’t want to sit down. We want to get top dollar for stuff, so let’s give them top dollar, quality stuff.”
3. Stay updated with current trends
The market is constantly changing, noted Zapata, who stays up-to-date on what’s popular by attending events, paying attention to what people are wearing and observing what her favorite retailers buy and avoid.
“We try to find a medium where we find what’s popular right now — for example, Yeezy GAP is popular right now, AntiSocialSocialClub and Supreme will always be popular in streetwear — and then we try to find more everyday brands that people also love, like your Nikes and Adidas, the things that are always tried and true,” Zapata said.
Finding ‘Home Items’
A combination of evaluating the market, experimenting with different listings, and general experience will set you up to find what Richard calls “household items,” such as a rare concert shirt that might cost several hundred dollars or a jacket of the National Championship by a college football player that sells for several thousand dollars.
Val Zapata turned her sneaker collecting hobby into a seven-figure business. Courtesy of Val Zapata
“If you go out there with as much information and give yourself as much opportunity as you can, you’re going to come across more of these home-run articles,” he said, noting that he’s not looking for these articles. rarely every day. daily basis. “When people hear these conversations, they think you just magically find all these $100 or $500 or $1,000 items. You do find them. But most of the items you find will be more everyday and everyday items that are They are in high demand, but you have to touch a lot of things and you have to give yourself a lot of opportunities to find them.”
An early piece of advice Zapata heard from another reseller has stuck with her: “Links over profits. Grow your links so people will always sell to you.”
You never know who you’ll meet if you put yourself out there on social media and attend events and trade shows. Zapata says the best deals she scored came from a “random” event in Boston in early 2024. She walked away with about 450 pairs of shoes, she said, “and we almost quadrupled our money on that deal, which that never happens with sneakers.”
It was a once in a blue moon deal that wouldn’t have been possible if she didn’t know her country as well as she did.