All the best entrepreneurship starts with a good idea. As we all sat around in isolation, one college student saw an opportunity in spare clothes lying around the house. What started as just a hobby quickly grew into a thriving shop.
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Gabby Oberes-Padre is a student studying business at UC Santa Cruz. She is one of a growing number of young people using Depop. Depop is an online marketplace like eBay, but just for clothes. Two months into the COVID-19 shutdown, Gabby started putting spare clothes around her house up for sale.
My grandparents are like hoarders practically. And it’s so much... They have so much vintage clothing that I wanted to resell it to make money for college.
Even the clothes hidden deep in the closet had value.
Vintage Victoria’s Secret from like the ’70s and ’80s... I didn’t realize how much it was going for.
Never mind the idea of dealing with your grandparents’ Victoria’s Secret lingerie... Her shop took off instantly! Now, she’s a verified Depop top seller, and her store has more than 13,000 followers!
And then once I got basically to get verified on Depop, that’s when I got into the whole entire world of secondhand selling and everything.
To keep up with the shop’s success, Gabby has devoted much of her time to running it. She transformed the basement of her home into a workstation, with clothing racks, a packaging station and a backdrop for modeling.
According to a report from the online consignment store ThredUp, Gen-Z shoppers are buying secondhand clothes more than any other age group. Mobile secondhand marketplaces like Depop and Grailed make shopping for clothes easier, especially during the pandemic.
People are just on their phones. They want to kill time. So going on apps like Depop, Poshmark, eBay, any of these places that do have a lot of vintage and secondhand items, that’s becoming more popular.
Aside from convenience, secondhand fashion is also in vogue.
I think nostalgia is definitely a huge thing.
That’s Tobi Ogunyankin. He’s on the e-board of USC’s Fashion Industry Association — a student organization that connects fashion-minded students with industry professionals.
A lot of our styles right now, I think, on-the-street wear, there’s like this whole archive movement where people really want stuff that was made in the ’90s or the 2000s.
Secondhand clothing is more than just throwback styles. It offers a more sustainable alternative to fashion in a notoriously damaging industry. Studies have shown that the fashion sector accounted for 4% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Much of that is caused by fast fashion, where inexpensive clothes are mass-produced, worn for a bit and thrown away.
When you look at the fashion industry right now, it’s very unsustainable. It’s one of the biggest contributors to climate change and waste, and we live in a society that’s getting much more progressive, but fashion hasn’t really caught up to that. I think secondhand fashion, upcycling, all that is definitely going to be very prominent looking forward.
The growth of secondhand fashion has sparked a greater conversation about sustainability. In January, Depop announced its goal to be carbon neutral by the end of 2021. Gabby hopes to be a part of a new wave of a more eco-friendly fashion industry by employing environmentally safe practices with her own Depop shop.
I really stress that everything is secondhand. So just recently I decided that my inventory is so big that I’m going to start pre-packaging things and clear poly mailers. A lot of people don’t realize that poly mailers... It’s equivalent to using plastic bags at a grocery store—it’s just as bad. So I use EcoEnclose, which is at least 100% of the packaging is recyclable or used recyclable materials, and it has a double strip so people can reuse it.
Buying secondhand is not just more sustainable, it also gives a personal touch that traditional retail can’t provide.
I put notes in every single one of my packages that says, like, thank you for shopping sustainably by buying from me. I speak to every single one of my customers individually to thank them. I message them and some of them, you know, we create conversations based on that.
Paying for college, helping the planet, and making new friends. With Depop, that’s how Gabby spent her time during the pandemic.