This Is How People Quietly Get Rich Reselling Clothes

This guy makes $120,000 a month reselling clothes online, and he only started last year. Believe it or not, this is the only business where you can actually start with $0. I knew nothing about clothes when I first started. This month alone, we listed over 4,000 items on eBay, completely on autopilot. But where do all these clothes come from? Americans are discarding over 90 million pounds of clothing every single day. It's just about getting our little piece of the pie. And who's buying all this used stuff? The key to selling high volume on eBay is by finding mid-grade items. I'm here to find out how he turns literal rags into riches. David, you make mad money, but before we get to the juicy part, tell us, in our audience, how you got started in this business. Yeah, so I started by coming to flea markets and thrift stores. Picking up my very first item here at this flea market, picked it up for $1, sold it for $35. It just opened my eyes to the possibilities of it, and then I kept doing it, and it kept working. So we're trying to spend as little as possible and make $600 right now. We're gonna show you exactly how that happens right on the go. Good morning. All right, so jackets are five bucks each. Jackets, five bucks, okay. So we're looking for brand, we're looking for condition. This is a vintage Columbia. This is a vintage Eddie Bauer. This one is really good. Is it, right? It's Rock-A-Wear. Big sizes sell very well on eBay. So once you buy this item, David, how much prep work are we talking about? Do we wash it? Do all gets washed, ironed, et cetera? Try to make sure everything is clean and washed. So we do our washing machine on site. All right, so we're at the actual flea market where you got started years and years ago. Walk me through the process. What are some hidden opportunities that somebody less experienced might not notice being here? Yeah, I think a lot of people overlook a lot of very common items that they don't see the value in. So the more you learn, the more you search up, you can get more knowledge and find a hidden opportunity within anything in here, and flip it on eBay for a profit. This is our haul. How many items? I got 15 items in what, 10 minutes? Yep, and we spent 75 bucks. Right here, I'm projected to make about 450 bucks on my $75 investment in like 10 minutes. That's pretty epic. All right, so we just came from the fleet market. Next thing we're gonna do, assuming we clean them, wash them, is take photos. And I wanna ask, what are the best practices specifically for eBay photos? Yeah, so you wanna have nice, clear pictures of any flaws. You wanna have a nice presentation. Honestly, most people don't have a photo station. So the best practice is just to use the floor at the house. You know, if you wanna invest 20 bucks into a little ring light, you can, but it's not necessary. We're just gonna set this up right here, assuming everything's ready to go. People would hate to have putting it on a dirty floor, David. Yeah, it's gonna get washed. Oh yeah, there you go. I try to take about 12 pictures for each item. We're just gonna take a nice, clear picture of the front, the sides, the arms, and then we do the tag to show the size. I was gonna say, besides photos, what else do our viewers need to know when it comes to taking photos, listing properly on eBay? What else are we throwing in? Keywords on the title is very, very important when it comes to clothing on eBay. This is a parka military jacket. If you don't add parka military on the title, it's not gonna cause it to pop up on eBay and sell faster. So keywords are very, very important for each item. All right, you ready to go pack something and ship it? Absolutely. We'll see how you do it. Yeah. How do you decide what goes on eBay versus wholesaling? It's actually the same exact kind of product. All the stuff that I throw into wholesale pallets, it's exactly the same what I would list. I just keep the $1,000 things on top. I keep it 100% honest. Anything from $20 to $80 is what I sell. Anything that I sell in pallets is $20 to $80. All right, so, I mean, this is my shoe. You tell me I could list this on eBay right now and make a profit. You can absolutely sell this. This is the kind of stuff I sell every single day. My dad sells a ton of shoes just like that. Tell us a little bit about your upbringing. Do you come from money? And where does your entrepreneurial drive and spirit come from? We came from absolutely nothing. My parents are from Mexico. When I grew up, my dad rented out a shed for my mom and myself when I was a baby. So, like, that's where we come from. But my dad always had the knack for being a businessman. So growing up, that's all I saw. He ran businesses, and I just knew that's what I wanted to do. Can you think of your first transaction ever? Maybe it was when you were five, six years old, maybe later? That was in middle school. All my friends were in basketball or in baseball or in football. One time, my dad sold me Under Armour shirts like long sleeves and football cleats. He was like, hey, if you can sell these, you keep the profit. So I sold the entire football team the same cleats, and I sold a bunch of Under Armour shirts to all the basketball team. That was in 13 years old. It was like three bucks a pop, maybe. True hustler right here. All right, how many items a month do you ship? So right now, we have like about 9,000 items going out across the whole business, going out every month. 9,000? That's insane. Walk us through the exact shipping process. So I believe you just got an order. Yeah. Walk us through the process. We just pulled the item out of the inventory. So this is a mountain hardware, a little hiking jacket, snow jacket. And we just try to weigh out every single item to get the accurate shipping price. And what do we got, two ounces? Yes, and I always round up, so I'll just put two, three. So when it comes to shipping, what makes clothes more attractive as opposed to anything else? So I used to do electronics, and when you have 40 electronics to ship in a day, boxes, bubble wrap, big heavy things is much more difficult than just this already packed, putting it in there, closing it, it's done. That's it. No tape, no bubble wrap, seven cents. That's it. How many were you able to do on your own, David, before you were like, man, I need to hire it because I want to scale? I would do like 1,000 a month in the past going out. On your own? On my own, by myself. And listing the items and prepping them, going out and buy them, doing everything by myself, just working really hard. But once you really want to scale more than that, you do need the help, you know? Okay, when I'm first starting out, obviously I'm not going to have probably somebody pick it up from my home, right? As you do. Got a lot of volume here, guys. But why don't we hit the road and go visit at Post Office? Let's go. Send this thing out. So you mentioned starting this business takes almost zero dollars to get going. What do you mean by that? Can you share more details? You don't really have to invest in any racking system, picture station, or even a shipping label printer. You don't have to do any of that. Where do I get going? Start from your closet. Start one by one. You probably have $3,000, $5,000 worth of clothes in your closet. How much is this jacket? How much did you pay for retail? I love it too much. It's been a while. Let's say in five years, you don't want it. Paid a hundred bucks plus. You can sell it for 50 in five years. Wow. Yeah, easy. That's pretty dope. What if I don't want to part with my clothes? I don't want, I don't have extra cash to spend on buying at thrift stores. What are other creative ways to get going at the very basic level? Go and ask all your relatives if they have extra clothes that they don't want to use anymore, that they want to donate to you. You can start a whole business with that. Over eight years doing this, have you ever lost faith in yourself, your business? Can you think of a specific example and how did you overcome it? Yes, absolutely. So a year ago, I lost my wholesale supply for electronics. I used to do electronics mainly and my eBay went totally down. I was always considering not doing eBay anymore and potentially getting a job. And I've completely like got to the point where I was about to quit, lost faith. And then I was like, okay, I'm going to give this one more shot. How about I try clothing? And that was one year ago. And here we are right now, one year later. You kill it, bro. It's amazing. What did you learn from that one experience, losing the supplier? That you can't rely on one supplier for your whole business model. You need many avenues to get product. You can't rely on thrift store. You can't rely on one flea market vendor, one flea market. You need to expand the way of getting product from all different areas. That's how you win in this business. So this is shipping, receiving. Guys, if this isn't impressive, I don't know what it is. Okay, be honest. How many stuff do you actually keep for yourself? I mean, is this coat something you found on a fleece market? I didn't find this in here, but I do keep quite a bit of things here and there that fits me good. I just always keep jeans, sweats, nice little hoodies. My girlfriend, I don't have to go to the mall anymore. We got Santa Claus at home, you know? All right, can we go check out the inventory? Absolutely. I wanna show our audience kind of how you set it up. It looks pretty simple, but I wanna see if there's anything behind the scenes. Absolutely, let's go. How are you able to sell so many items, so much inventory on eBay? Yeah, so I follow a 80-20 rule when it comes to my eBay store. 80% of my store is full of medium grade items. They go from 20 to $30. Very simple, everyday value stuff. And then the 20% of my store is like 80, $100 things, $500 things, $600 Louis Vuitton. That's a very small percentage of my store. Everything's numbered. Can you help us understand how your inventory system works? Yeah, so it starts from zero, zero, one to infinity. No numbers ever repeat themselves. So that way, within this little space that we have here, we consolidate and move back all the inventory. Last month, we sold, this entire rack was empty once we consolidated. That's how much stuff we sold within like one month. So then what would you recommend who doesn't wanna sell and move this much volume in terms of getting started? Yeah, so when I first started, I focused on $100 things, $200 things, $500 things only, and only selling a few of those. But it's very difficult to get that many of those in order to really grow a business. It's harder to come by those kinds of items. But if you're just trying to make extra, an extra $3,000, $5,000 a month, selling 20 things can result in that result of getting $5,000 a month. So I tell people when they're first starting out, if they wanna keep it small, focus on high-end things, turning five into 200 if possible. It doesn't come often. It does happen. You gotta really treasure hunt and be out active looking for those deals. This is more predictable. This is infinite. I can get an infinite amount of these kinds of things so it's more scalable. David's knack for turning rags into riches led him to hitting six figures within his first year. Now he's making that every month. That kind of growth doesn't happen by accident. It happens from setting up your business to handle success. Growing a business is one thing, but sustaining that growth is a challenge that many businesses aren't set up to handle. That's where Bizzy comes in. They've helped over a million entrepreneurs lay the groundwork for lasting success by streamlining the process of launching a new business. With Bizzy, there's no fluff, no hidden fees, no fine print, just a one-time cost that covers everything from compliance tracking to setting up your LLC. Plus, Bizzy's founder-led and bootstrapped so they actually understand what it's like to start small and think big. They'll even manage your filings and set you up with a professional address with digital mail access so you can stay on top of things from anywhere. David's story is proof. Success isn't something you pull off the rack. Bizzy helps you custom fit your business for long-term growth. Click the link below and launch your new business today with Bizzy. eBay fees, I gotta wonder, are they worth it? Talk to us about that. Yeah, so eBay fees are 100% worth it. I paid 6,000 last month in pure eBay fees, which is like a 12.5%, something like that. eBay spends billions of dollars on marketing so that all you have to do is take a picture, post it onto eBay, and you get customers through their platform, through their marketing. They get 100 million users a month on eBay, and we get access to those people by paying those fees. That's the way I look at it. All right, let's go check out the office a little bit up close. I know we did some shipping there, but I wanna see what else you do. Yeah, absolutely. Cool. You are shipping a tremendous amount of items. It's hard to believe you can source everything from a thrift store. Can you share more on that? I buy from donation pickup centers, recycling centers that get clothing in massive quantities, raw, untouched clothing, and that's where I buy it. I have my little people that I call, and they fulfill a whole truck and then get it delivered here. That's where I'm at now. To get to your scale, that's probably a must then, right? That's a must. To buy in bulk. The only way to get to this point is buying in massive quantities. And what are they charging to buy in bulk? It's usually anywhere from 30 to 65 cents per pound, depending on where it's at, who you're dealing with. Not everything is good. If everything was good, I'd be making a million dollars per truck, right? But there's a lot of excess stuff like baby clothing, but then there's some really amazing things in there also. So it's just all raw, and then we sort it out, we separate it, we wash it, we clean it, we prep it. So we get it extremely cheap, but there's a lot of work that goes into it. How much of it ends up in the garbage? We try to only throw away stuff that is like literally the bags that goes in there. None of it gets discarded. We try to make sure everything is recycled properly. There's a lot of rag houses, places that use that stuff. They cut up old clothing, turn it into rags, recycle it. I don't like to throw anything in the dump. I wanna make sure that everything that we get gets done properly. Right. How much were you able to generate revenue-wise if it's just thrift stores or flea markets, for example? I got to 18,000 a month. Whoa. With pure thrift stores and flea markets. By myself. That's a serious number for most people. Yeah, absolutely. It was a lot of effort. If somebody wants to start buying in bulk, what kind of suppliers should they be looking for? Yeah, so a really good option that's out there is the Goodwill Bins Outlet. So the Goodwill Bins Outlet is a great way to get 100 pounds, 200 pounds in a day, which it's quite a bit of volume for someone that does it out of their house. You can go there, pay by the pound, $1.96, depending on where you're at in the country, turn it into 30 if you focus on better stuff, you know? So one day you can spend 196, get $3,000 worth of stuff. I mean, we mentioned this statistic, right? Over 90 million pounds get dumped every day in America. Yeah. And yet you make it sound like finding bulk sellers, you know, truckloads of food is a little tough. Why is that? A lot of stuff gets exported out of the country. Most of the stuff, the bulk of the stuff gets out of here. It doesn't stay in here for some reason. A lot of it goes to India, Pakistan, Africa, South America, Europe. It's all exported mainly. He's making serious money with that export. Absolutely. Imagine. Is there an immediate stamp between thrifting and then buying truckloads of clothes? There's not a straight line to follow to get to that point, but that's where you start. If you build up a relationship with someone that owns a thrift store, that can maybe sell you Goodwill overstock of like a full truckload or something, that's maybe where that could go. But there's not a step-by-step plan to get to that point. You have to kind of figure it out. Obviously, I share as much as I possibly can, and I help a lot of people find these kind of connections as well to like my YouTube channel. I help a lot of people. I give it out. I truly believe there's so much out there for everyone that me giving it out isn't gonna affect me too much. I just can't give out specific phone numbers, but I can, you know, point people in the right direction. Yeah, the law of abundance, my friend. Absolutely. It's true. Yeah. How did you find your first bulk seller? I started out with just doing buyouts, people from flea markets. I just had like that guy today at the flea market. He had a ton. And I would just be like, hey, how much if you just like fill up your box truck and bring it to the shop? And I just buy out like 40 bags. That's how I started, buying in bulk like that. You obviously understand your market very, very well. What's your advice to people new to this business to, you know, to get ahead and know how things work? Yeah, when I first started, it was just literally searching up item by item at the flea markets and thrift stores, getting idea for what something goes for, materials, brands, styles, all that goes into it. Watching a ton of videos, really like absorbing all the knowledge possible, and then applying to that, applying that right away into the business. And trial and error, going out to the flea market, like I said, was just the biggest thing possible. You can watch stuff, watch videos all day long, but really just getting out there physically and doing it really moves the needle really quickly. In addition to knowing your marketplace, what other important skills would you say would really be helpful for this business? For this business, you have to stay organized, have a nice overall system, but being organized is number one, because if something isn't organized, you're gonna lose packages, stuff is gonna be late. You're not gonna know where stuff is, and that's a very, very important in this business. Any best practices you can share with our viewers when it comes to processing, especially for beginners? Yeah, I would just say dissecting it into categories, very simply, like jackets and tops, shorts, jeans, and just breaking it up like that. It looks less overwhelming when you get a bunch of stuff. It's like, oh, what did I do with all this? Separating it, breaking it into pieces, and just taking your time with it as you go, as you learn how to do everything. I think that's very good. Is it possible to find bulk suppliers online, just chat GBT and Google? It's very difficult, but there is a couple options. One idea is going on Whatnot. Whatnot is a live streaming platform. If I'm a seller and I have 100 items, you go on there and you have a bid for 10 seconds, if you want, six seconds. Hey guys, we're gonna start this at three bucks. And it goes to 10, 15, 20, depending on how valuable the item is. Whoever's in the live stream can purchase the item at six seconds. Yeah. Like purchase paid for? Paid for, all, everything. And yeah, you can sell a lot of volume with that also. Okay, I'll have to check it out. All right, my friend, when it comes to buying from bulk suppliers, what's the bare minimum orders that we need to be prepared to pay? So this is the bare minimum order was 44,000 pounds, a full 53 footer. It was like $23,000. Can I start smaller and buy a hundred pounds from someone? There's a lot of people that buy stuff like this, separate all the good stuff out and wholesale little a hundred pound lots, 50 pound boxes. I personally don't offer that. We only do like bigger quantities. Both are hard. This is harder. Almost no one has access to this. There's no blueprint. There's no website that you can find. It's actually very difficult to get wholesale. Actually, a lot of people struggle with that. And that's why I saw a demand for that as well, because I was trying to find some myself. I was like, there's no one. No one's offering this. So I saw a hole in the market. All right, Blitz time with David. You ready? Let's do it. Are there any types of clothing you stay away from and why? I try to avoid baby clothing and kids' clothing. It sells a lot slower. When you sell on eBay, is it auctions or buy now? It's all buy it now. Out of all the listings? Every single one is buy it now, yeah. That's cool. What's your biggest strength and weakness? My biggest strength and weakness is that I'm very impulsive. So sometimes I gotta hold myself back from growing a little too fast or just being a little aggressive buying stuff. So that's it. How do you avoid wasting time answering lots of questions from buyers? I make sure we have very great pictures, very good descriptions, and great titles to really know, to let people know what the item is. And then they don't even ask questions because it's all answered. Makes sense. You're obviously a hard worker, but how do you work? But do you work weekends? I don't work weekends. Last one. What's a telltale sign that tells you someone isn't right for this business? If they can't just wake up and motivate themselves to get up and get after it. You know, not everyone is built for that. They just don't take action. Yeah. That's a wrap. You started as a sole operator. Now you've got a team, a team of five people. Can you tell us who they are and what are they doing? Yeah, so one is my cousin, Richie, my sister's boyfriend. They both help me sort and separate all the truckloads. They are kind of a Swiss army knife. They help me out with a lot of different tasks. And then I have my two sisters that are pretty much part-time. I have three photographers, my other sister's boyfriend. So we got two potential brother-in-laws in here, my two sisters and the boyfriends. They all take pictures. They're all pretty much part-time. I know this is out of topic, but how many photos can they take or how many pieces of clothing can they go through in a day, realistically? Every single day, we're doing 200 a day. And I want to do more, but it is a little difficult to do that much. It takes a lot of hours, manpower, staying consistent, but we will get there. 200 is a lot, you know? Every single day, prepped, washed, cleaned, ready, photographed, listed, all that stuff every single day. What were your initial startup costs? I started off with $0. I had a little small sneaker collection that was my personal use. And I was like, hey man, I don't even use these anymore. Let's just start listing them up. And then I even quickly made $3,500 with just a few sneakers. What did it cost you to hire your first employee? So yeah, it was mainly paying out, the minimum wage at the time was like $16 an hour. And then I had them part-time 20 hours a week. So that was the cost right there. How many employees do you have as of today? Right now, we have five. So across five employees, what's your total payroll expense as of today? It's about $17,000 in a month, yeah. What are your total monthly expenses? Right now, we're spending at about $50,000 to $60,000 a month overall. Wait, on what? The inventory to buy a truck like this, the payroll like we talked about, I just bought a forklift. I'm about to buy a box truck. We're growing a lot right now. So obviously, we generate 120 while we're growing. That's a beautiful thing. So whenever everything is nice and set up, everything's invested and stuff like that, I'm not buying a forklift every month. Once that's all taken care of, we put more cash in the bank account. Do you sell any other kind of clothing versus medium grade? And you mentioned that. Yeah, absolutely. I do sell a good amount of high-end stuff. It's very expensive, $1,000 pieces. I just found a $1,500 t-shirt, ACDC vintage 1992 original t-shirt from their tour. That's insane. So what percentage of your business is the higher-end items? Like 8%, if that, of high-end stuff like that. But that's just cherry on top. What would be the profit margins then on mid-grade as opposed to high-end? Quite different? I make all my money back on mid-grade when I sell something very expensive. It's usually pure profit, cherry on top. You did $120,000 last month. How much of it was profit? So it was about 50 to 60% profit margins doing this. That's insane. I love anything over 30%. Anything over 30 is golden. It's rare in business, for sure. Can you think of any specific values, lessons from childhood that you still carry forward in business today? I think good old-fashioned hard work. Right now, the business is growing exponentially. And right now, my workers, they do a lot of the stuff in the back end. But it is important for me to be working hard consistently, even when stuff is going great, and not lose that competitive edge. And always stay hungry, always want more, always continue growing and get better. And that is the number one thing, because in the past, I would get complacent. I would be very happy where I was at, and that's when stuff would slow down. And that's my mentality. C equals failure, in other words. Yeah, that's exactly how I look at it now. Do you ever accept offers from customers who want to pay way less than your listing price? Absolutely, I always accept offers, because the name of this game is moving product, moving product consistently. I always give amazing deals, and people always come back and buy more. People always love a good deal on eBay. And since I get my stuff so cheap, I have the luxury to do that. So is there a way too low number that you just won't accept? Absolutely. How low is too low? I think more than 40% off is a little too much. Unless it's a really expensive item that I just marked up too much because it was rare. But for the most part, more than 50 is pushing it. Like it's already a good deal compared to like retail. So 50 is the max, yeah. That's fair. What's your approach to getting great reviews? Yeah, so I just make sure we sell what we're saying that we're going to sell on the title. That the condition is exactly how it is, and that ensures the customer is going to be happy. And by default, we get a lot of reviews. We have like over 8,000 reviews on my eBay store right now. Well, how does that work for eBay? Can you share any insights as far as their policy, negative, positive reviews, how to deal with it? A lot of people think that getting a negative reviews at that sentence actually doesn't affect you, your sales at all. You want as many positives as possible, but eBay just looks at it for people to gauge whether they buy from you or not. Good to know. And if they don't leave you or review anything, what does eBay do? eBay just changed the policy to where if someone doesn't leave a review within a month, you automatically get a positive. That's something they just added. What perks has owning a business, operating a successful business brought you? Oh, it's just the freedom of knowing that I don't depend on money now. Yeah, I don't look at money the same way I look at money as a tool to save time and generate more money. I don't look at it as survival anymore. Where do you want to be like a year or two from now? I want to do 6 million next year. Overall with all the business, just selling clothing online, and we're setting systems up for that now. Wow, that's amazing. Can you clarify, because I was thinking it's solely eBay, but you do wholesale, you do sell bulk to others. Can you help us kind of understand the process or the business model, the structure? Yeah, so I got to the point where I'm getting so much inventory. That truck you saw there, that's 44,000 pounds. I can buy one every day. Can I list all that to eBay every day? No way. No way, right? Right now, I totally, my struggle is that 200 a day is a little slow for us because we get so much. So I got to the point where I got my stuff really cheap in such large quantities that I figured I can solve the problem for other people. Guys like you who are doing what you're doing on a smaller scale? There are so many people that do it just like me across the nation. There's a whole community of people that do this and I solve their sourcing problem. They don't go out and hunt. They don't have to source for three months. Stand in the frigid cold. Yeah. In a nice coat. Yeah, and a lot of people, they're paying $10 for the jeans that I just paid. Then they get it for $5 when they buy it for me. And they get it in massive quantities so they can just focus on listing, processing the inventory, and not sourcing anymore. So I solve that problem with a pallet. That's what I love about what you're doing and what we're doing, right? It's all about starting a business with zero, growing it, building it, scaling it, and then saying, hey, where else do I go with this? Yeah, exactly. It's not just eBay for you, but now you're outsourcing to everybody else. Yeah. Pretty cool. Is there anything you wish you'd know before you got into this business? Yeah, so the very first thing was cultivating relationships. That goes very far in this business. You saw at the flea market where that guy already knew who I was. When I paid, he told me, hey, I have five bags of Levi's in the car. Do you want to buy them right now? But we're recording. I was like, no, I'll see you Monday. That's a relationship, and cultivating relationships takes you very far in business in general. So aside from eBay, David, are you doing any outside advertising to push your eBay store? Yeah, so one thing I do do is promoted listings through eBay. And I do add a percentage on top of my fees, and it pushes my listings way more. Last month alone, 90% of my sales came from promoted listings alone. So that is an extra thing that I pay for, but it pays dividends. It does an amazing job. You always do that, or certain slow seasons to push sales? What's your thought process on- Year-round, day-to-day, every single day, everything's promoted like that. In the wintertime, like right now, you sell more expensive coats. People are in the holiday spirit, buying presents. But in the summertime, you still sell a lot of stuff, you know? So it's good to do that year-round. What's been your smartest business move so far, you would say? When I first started out, I was listing 30 items in a day. That takes all the day to do that. And I figured while I was listing, what if there was someone right next to me doing the same exact thing? So the first thing I did was hire people to help me list more items. Meanwhile, I was still working. So I just duplicated myself. A lot of people are hesitant to do that in a business like this, because it's a smaller business. But I always push for getting help and multiplying yourself and delegating as quickly as possible, as soon as the money makes sense. At first, you have to grind. You have to be just a lone wolf. And then once the money makes sense, once you get some capital and you want to expand, you get more inventory, then it makes sense to get some help. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to check out episode 244 with Chris Corner, who shares his secrets on how to spot business opportunities that have led him to starting over 75 businesses. Thank you for watching. Take a second to like and subscribe, and we'll see you next time.