Transcription
Over the last 15 months, I've made tens of thousands of dollars selling used clothing online. I filtered through over 6,000 sales to find the 4,500 sales that were men's clothing items. Despite all the money I've made selling used clothing, the top 10 brands that I've sold have accounted for over $30,000 in net profit directly to my pocket.
Today, we're going to jump into the 10 brands I've sold the most amount of times and made the most money on during my time as a full-time reseller. I'm going to be throwing in some honorable mention brands, and I'll tell you why these brands are in my top 10. We'll discuss the current sell-through rate in my store for these brands, the average sales price, and so much more.
The reason I think this is so useful is that bolos (be on the lookout items) are amazing, and finding that bolo on the rack when you're thrifting is just an exhilarating feeling. But the truth is that bolos only come and go so often in the thrift store, and even when you do find them, you're competing against other resellers who might not be affordably priced.
Here are a few overall stats from the data that I compiled, covering every single men's clothing item:
- My average sales price, including the purchase price plus the shipping price, was $32.32.
- My average buy cost is $6, and my average shipping cost is $5.70.
- The current sell-through rate in my store is 94.7%.
I have recently started selling on Poshmark again, which is why my sell-through rate has come down slightly from 100%. Some of those items would sell on eBay, but they're selling on Poshmark instead.
Before we get to the actual list, I have six brands that fell just outside of the top 10 that I do want to mention:
- Dutch Trading Company
- Tommy Bahama
- Lululemon
- Abercrombie and Fitch
- FootJoy
- The North Face
As you're looking at all these brands on the screen, you can see a pretty common theme between them. Can you tell which one of the six is an outlier?
What all these brands have in common is that they're very easily accessible in my area. Other than Lululemon, these really aren't the best brands, but they are readily available, so I have bought and sold them many times. Lululemon is the one exception, and the reason that it's not higher on the list is only that I can only find it so often, and when I do find it, sometimes it's not priced affordably.
The rest of these brands are ones I find so often that I'm just cherry-picking the very best items, and they still account for a large number of my sales.
I don't want to waste any more of your time, so let's jump into it.
**10th Place: Eddie Bauer**
With 90 sales, my average sales price for the brand was $32.30. This brand is a consistent seller for me and sells better in the fall and winter months. They have great outerwear pieces, and one of my favorite things about it is that resellers are passing on it constantly, and it's typically not overpriced at the thrift store. The current sell-through rate of this brand in my store is 53%, but I would expect that to go up drastically in the fall and winter. If you want to start selling or sell more Eddie Bauer in your store, pretty much everything I sell in this brand falls under one of three categories: it's either a coat or jacket, a vest, or it's in an upgraded line like First Ascent or Trax.
**9th Place: Carhartt**
With 111 sales and an average sales price of just over $40, Carhartt has the highest average sales price of any of the brands on the list today. That's obviously because I sold some really nice jackets last winter. I call Carhartt the king of workwear. I love selling workwear because people genuinely need it to do their jobs or to do things around their house or their farm, so it has a lot of functional value. Because of this, the condition doesn't always have to be perfect either, so I'm rarely putting it back based on flaws or stains. This is another brand that thrives in the fall and winter, but the current sell-through rate in my store is 121%. Even now in the spring, some things to look for in this brand would be vintage items, obviously the heavy jackets, and items in the FR line, which is the flame-resistant line. One fun bolo would be the vintage double knee shorts.
**8th Place: Columbia**
With 117 sales, my average sales price for the brand was $29.21. This one is similar to Eddie Bauer, where it's typically passed up by other resellers and rarely priced up at the thrift store. Now, going back to those brands that aren't as good, I am passing on Columbia probably 90 to 95% of the time, but the 5 to 10% I am picking up makes it worthwhile because I do find this brand so often. Put another tally in the brands that really thrive in the colder months, and outerwear is key when it comes to this brand. Vintage camo pieces, the Titanium and Omni-Tech lines are just a few things to be on the lookout for in this brand. Make sure you look up the style codes for items as well because that can greatly improve the sell-through rate and the average sales price. If you want to know more about that, I do have a video on how I use style codes to make more money selling my clothing items.
**7th Place: Peter Millar**
With 138 sales, my average sales price for the brand is just shy of $39. Finally, a brand that is not currently out of season! You can tell by the current sell-through rate in my store being 156%. I do have one disclaimer with this brand: make sure you're not picking up the items that are 100% cotton. Those older styles rarely sell anymore, so do yourself a favor and just leave them on the rack or leave them in the bins. The basic performance items have come down in value as well, but if you're selective with the prints, patterns, and models that you're picking up, as well as your buy cost, this brand is still money. Outerwear and the E66 pants are two of my favorites in this brand. This is another brand to learn how to look up the style code on, and I think that's one contributing factor to me having over a 150% sell-through rate in my store.
The next two brands I want to talk about are kind of more of a disclaimer. The first one would be vintage items. This would include items that sold mainly because they were vintage or the age and had really nothing to do with the brand. This accounted for 147 sales, and my average sales price for these items was $24.80, which you can tell is a bit lower than my average. A lot of these items were generic, maybe destination or sports items that didn't have a strong brand attached to them. The best part of this category, though, are vintage sweaters. Make sure you know the different styles, materials, and keywords to use for vintage sweaters because you can overcome a no-name brand or a bad brand when the vintage sweater is just right. Make sure you're doing your research and try it out in small doses while you gain experience along the way.
The second asterisk on the list is the brand Walter Hagen. I do have 182 sales in this brand over the last 15 months. I know that seems random, and it kind of is. I was presented with a wholesale opportunity to buy tons of Walter Hagen golf shorts, and I have only a few pairs left. I bought close to 200 pairs before last golf season, and I've sold through so many of them. I don't really recommend picking it up at the thrift store, though.
Back to the list, we have **6th Place: Adidas**
With 189 sales, my average sales price for this brand is $35.07. Some of my common thrifted items in this brand are geometric golf polos, golf pants, and joggers. The average sales price in this brand is a bit higher than some of the other ones and similar brands that you'll see on the list, but that's mainly because I had some excellent online and retail arbitrage finds in this brand last year. If you're not familiar with online and retail arbitrage, that's basically when you purchase new inventory from an online retailer or from a retail store and sell it back online yourself. One find I had in particular were Adidas down puffer jackets and down puffer vests. I found them a few different times from different places, and those sold anywhere from $50 to $90 depending on the color, size, and style. I would say the average sales price for the thrifted items was probably closer to the $25 to $28 mark. Similar to the other athletic brands you'll see on the list, if you're picking this brand up cheap, you can still make great money on it. It currently has a 92% sell-through rate in my store, so the items that I'm picking up in this brand are still moving fast.
In **5th Place: Under Armour**
I did 194 sales, and the average sales price was $28.33. Under Armour compares very closely to Adidas, other than those down jackets that I found. But I will say for Under Armour, my main focus is golf apparel: polos, pants, and shorts. You can see that with the stats because it's currently golf season, and my sell-through rate for Under Armour right now is 116%. These golf items for Under Armour don't sell for tons of money, but they do sell, which is one of the staples of my business. I try to overcome the lower average sales price with a really high sell-through rate to keep the cash flow moving. A couple of other items to be on the lookout for in this brand would be the upgraded outerwear lines like the Infrared line and the Storm line.
In **4th Place: Levi's**
With 203 sales, my average sales price for Levi's was $35.23. I'm not sure where to start with this brand. I've been buying and selling it for such a long time, but the deeper I look into the research, the more profitable items I'm able to find in this brand. I talk about the styles and sizes that are good in my videos all the time, so if this is something that interests you, check out any one of my thrift hauls or what sold videos. I have been experimenting with different styles and sizes because this brand has been so good to me, but that has resulted in a slightly lower sell-through rate in my store currently of 81.9%. Honestly, I feel like that sell-through rate is still pretty good considering that Levi's can be found in every single thrift store. The average sales price is relatively high compared to the other brands on this list because I do charge a bit more for shipping on jeans and heavier items, which all the items in this brand fall into that category. They also have a very functional value, which I think is really important. Similar to workwear and outdoor apparel, the functionality keeps the value high.
We finally made it to the podium! In **3rd Place: LL Bean**
With 221 sales, my average sales price for this brand is just over $32. This is probably my personal favorite on the list just because I love outdoor apparel and genuinely like the brand. Luckily, the proof is in the pudding; the stats show that it's a great brand to buy and resell, and it's not just because I like it. Sales velocity and sales price skyrocket in the fall and winter, but even now, I have a 97% sell-through rate in my store. Those will skyrocket at the end of the year, and I've been adding LL Bean items to my store every single week all year long, so I think it's going to be great come those fall and winter months. Make sure you're Googling the item ID for LL Bean and putting the model name in your title on eBay. This will increase the sell-through rate and the average sales price for your listings. If you're a lower volume seller and just chasing the home runs, make sure you look up all LL Bean outerwear, Gore-Tex jackets, and fisherman sweaters.
In **2nd Place: Polo Ralph Lauren**
With 234 sales, the average sales price for this brand in my store was $33.49. I did include all lines of Ralph Lauren, other than the RLX golf apparel. This brand has so many lines, sublines, types of items, and different models; the world is really your oyster. My current sell-through rate for this brand in my store is 140%. This comes from learning which items and which lines sell quickly because a lot of them move very, very slow or don't even sell at all. Double RL and Purple Label are definite bolos; be on the lookout and pick those up anytime you find them. I still have not found them, but I will tell you some of the common items that I'm picking up very regularly: bigger sizes, which is 3XL or bigger, in my opinion; sweaters with upgraded materials that would include wool, merino wool, cashmere, linen, silk, and things like that; outerwear pieces; new tags items; wild prints; big logos; and performance pieces.
My number one selling brand, with 413 sales, is **Nike**. My average sales price for the brand is $29.90. Even though I sold nearly double the amount of this brand than any other brand, I was still shocked that this was number one. I thought surely Levi's or Ralph Lauren would have been my number one selling brand, but when I saw it was Nike, I realized I do buy and sell that brand all the time. The sell-through rate in my store is currently 111%, which tells me the items I do pick up in this brand sell quickly. One of my common pickups in this brand that contributed to a lot of sales was pairing Nike performance pieces with big colleges or big sports teams that have a big following. An example of this would be a New York Yankees golf polo or an Ohio State jacket. I did also have some heavy hitters in this brand; I sold some Nike down puffer jackets—two of them, actually—for over $200 a piece. The Nike ACG line is my personal favorite because I love outdoor apparel, of course. Tiger Woods golf pieces, cargo pants, and vintage windbreaker jackets and pants were some of the items I bought and sold the most times over the last year or so.
As you can see, none of the brands on this list were really bolos or amazing, amazing, amazing brands. But what I did was take the best items from every brand that I can find on a regular basis, and I try to figure out how I can get them as cheaply as possible and how I can sell them for the most money and as quickly as possible. All these brands are great representations of that.
I hope after watching this video, you're able to do that with different brands that are easily found in your area. If you found information like this interesting, I'm going to be doing a live stream where I pull up the spreadsheet that I used to compile all this data and just go through and answer your questions, doing research on the spot to find trends of what I've sold over those 4,500 items over the last 16 months. Make sure you hit the subscribe button and turn on notifications so you know when I go live to do that and for my next video!