An added bonus is to make money from something we love to do right?
Some vintage sellers have this figured out.
Need Some Quick Cash?
Photo courtsey of Brooke Austell
If youre looking to boost your income this month, weve got just the thing for you.
How Much Can You Really Make?
Reselling instructional websiteFlea Market Flipperreported earning $20,359 in a month from flipping used items.
(Ah, thrifting you never know what youll find.
This is the joy.)
An important tip: dont limit yourself to one punch in of item, like clothes or furniture.
The secondhand sellers we spoke with sold everything from clothing to bamboo bars, artwork and napkin rings.
Its less about the item and more about finding something that speaks to an audience and tells a story.
The 22 year old met a girl who was a top seller on clothing resale site Depop.
I pay my rent from my sales here, the friend told Austell.
She started using Depop as her main source of income.
As an avid fan of fashion and modeling, the career pivot wasnt completely out of Austells wheelhouse.
Austell also has her sourcing process down to a bit of a science.
She goes to The Salvation Army on Wednesdays, which is a half-off day where she is.
(Check out your local Salvation Army site to find out when they havediscount days.)
She goes to Goodwill once every other week but usually leaves with no more than 10 items.
Austell also uses Whatnot.
Thesocial marketplaceallows users to run livestream auctions and sell their items off in real time.
She might sell everything at $5 just to start.
As shesgrown her business, shes also begun to experiment with what she calls style bundles.
Her numbers show shes doing something right.
The most important bit of advice she can offer is consistency and doling things out.
Developing a style and niche can help as well.
For example, she tried to provide a wider range of sizes, but it affected her photos.
She would have to pin or clip the clothes to such a degree that they no longer seemed realistic.
Still, she has successfully veered from her traditional style.
She once won a pair of Nike Dunks through a contest.
That was roughly three years ago.
Now, her Depop,Girlfriend Material, has more than 34,000 followers and is largely her full-time job.
People know that Im trustworthy and not going to be scamming.
Like Austell, Beto advises consistency above all.
Beto described her style as 90s and early 2000s and pretty girly.
Her wardrobe is largely neutrals, with the occasional pop of pink and red.
I enjoy not necessarily adhering to one specific style.
Estate sales also garnered some of her best finds, like four pairs of vintage leather Italian boots.
Leather jackets as well are an almost guaranteed moneymaker.
But it still comes down to frequency over individual items for Beto.
You brew coffee at home, you dont walk into Target and you refuse to order avocado toast.
(Can you sense my millennial sarcasm there?)
In her case, however, the timing was purely coincidental.
Luckily for her, she is one of the people who can.
I just realized that the market in Florida is really unique, Wuagneux said.
Where I lived in New York, you couldnt touch these antiques.
Florida is a wealth of opportunity for vintage sellers, in part because of its transient population.
Families moved expecting their high-quality but perhaps dated furniture to seamlessly fit with their modern condo.
She paid $300 for the piece but sold it for $2,400 once finished.
I would say thats kind of my niche, she said.
She now sells in a few local retail locations as well as on Etsy and through her site.
After all, working on commission means a certified sale.
But she found some of her greatest items almost by chance or rescued them practically from the dump.
When it comes to furniture, Wuagneux said if it has legs, see to it theyre not broken.
And we all know what that translates to not sellable.
The book has always just been an inspiration to me and aesthetically, too, she said.
She used nature and her surroundings in Florida to inspire everything in her house.
For Waring, it became something of a mission statement.
She dabbles in clothing and accessories, but her main items are houseware.
Waring likes to find objects that might not work in her house but will certainly work in someone elses.
To some degree, she knows what she wants to sell and what she definitely doesnt.
But her real secret is using her treasure hunt expertise to find artwork that sells.
However, she admits it has garnered her some of her best profits.
She recently found an Italian-made dresser mirror from the 1950s or 1960s.
She has yet to list it.
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Ive never seen one like it, at least nothing as finely made as it is, she said.
Aside from artwork, home accessories and furniture, Waring finds the occasional rare book or art book.
At one point, she discovered she purchased the photography book of her midwifes ex-boyfriend.
Perhaps part of Warings business, albeit unintentionally, is intuiting psychologically what her audience might want.
Since the pandemic, shes noticed increased interest in entertaining and hosting gatherings.
So she bought vintage bakeware, baskets and napkin rings, which have been a top seller.
I thought that nobody used napkin rings anymore, she said.
But I had people asking, Do you have any more of these napkin rings?
People think theyre out of fashion.
Her work has appeared in Teen Vogue, Smithsonian Magazine and the Tampa Bay Times.
