Sweet Smell of Success: Rags to riches
Here is one of three unlikely success stories from Susan Spencer:
The clothes in Jade Myers' closet just hang out, eagerly awaiting their next closet. "Everything I own, I sell," Myers said. "I rotate everything through."
Myers calls herself a professional "thrifter."
"Thrifting means you're gonna go and find secondhand clothing that's been donated, and generally, you find a really good deal."
"You don't see this as just a bunch of old clothes?" Spencer asked.
"No. I see it as treasure!" she laughed.
Her hunt for literally buried treasure takes her to thrift stores, such as the one she visited with Spencer in Brooklyn, New York. Finding time to do this meant quitting her day job.
Spencer asked, "What was it, the decision to go out on your own with old clothes?"
"Well, they're not all old!" Myers laughed.
"They're pretty old! Looking pretty bad here!"
But Myers knows exactly what she's looking for. ("You can imagine somebody in the '80s totally rocked this!") It's 25 bucks for all the stuff you can stuff into a single bag. Myers left with three, confident she could sell it quickly.
First she cleans, sizes and, with the help of a friend who's a model, photographs each piece. Then, up it goes on Poshmark, an app started by Manish Chandra in Redwood, Calif.
"There's almost a trillion dollars' worth of clothes that are sitting in people's closets," Chandra said. "And so we wanted to make it super-easy for anybody to sell and open up a boutique."
Easy enough that Poshmark says some two million people are using the app to sell discarded duds. Myers has more than 50,000 followers.
"Do you have in your mind a profile of who your best customer is?" Spencer asked.
"The one who buys from me again!" Myers laughed.
She says she nets up to $6,000 a month.
Her highest-profit margin, she said, was on a fur coat she bought for $4, and sold for about $1,000. Talk about rags to riches!
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