These days, the idea of selling and trading your old clothes for cash is the norm, especially when a new season is coming up. Sure, the Internet has made it easier than ever to resell gently worn duds, but there's also another option: Take your clothes to consignment shops that offer you cash on the spot. For stuff you planned to throw away or donate, it's a super easy way to get some extra spending money.
If it’s your first time offering your unwanted threads for discounted second-hand wares or a few extra bucks, chances are you’ll be a bit curious as to what exactly the staff of your local consignment or vintage shop is looking for. Sure, you could just walk in and drop everything off, but that's a great way to end up with $20 in cash or $30,000 in store credit, a dilemma recently parodied in Broad City:
To maximize your consignment shop experience and the amount of bank you can bring home, we spoke with different buyers from Harlem to Southern California about the training process, what can instantly explain a piece of clothing’s value, and what’s not true about every buyer (hint: they won’t judge you by what you bring in, even if it’s ten different pairs of cargo shorts).
Buffalo Exchange
Before Buffalo Exchange opened its Chelsea storefront in New York City four years ago, longtime manager Justin Goellner already worked at three other locations from the East Village to Chicago. Goellner currently hires, trains, and manages the team at the Chelsea shop, including its buyers, which is a rigorous learning process. New hires spend their first weeks dedicating a couple hours of their shift watching a manager or senior buyer work with selling customers. And up to three months can pass until these rookies can do transactions on their own.
Every month, the buying team holds meetings to talk about trends and price points. If Goellner notices a particular buyer struggling with a specific area—a streetwear fan who isn’t too familiar with handbags, for example—he most likely will have that employee go to a department store to browse the labels, styles, where they’re produced, and prices. “Then we’ll assign them to do a presentation on that area so they’re forced to learn more about it,” mentioned Goellner. “You can look online and look at a million different handbags, but if you don’t go into a store and touch a handbag, you won’t know if it’s fake or not. You have to feel what quality leather feels like.”
Locations can determine a store’s inventory.
“When I started managing the East Village store, I would come across the most awesome merchandise in the world. Even stores in the Lower East Side would bring their overstock of really great merchandise there. Initially when you think of our Chelsea location, it’s not exactly ‘fashion.’ But there’s all of these showrooms here, so the people who work there might drop off stuff from their closet or a designer might bring over samples.”
Labels won’t always catch a buyer’s attention.
“Customers will bring us a bunch of great designer labels but we’re more concerned about the style. The pieces might be 12- to 20-years-old, not current enough to make sense but not old enough to be vintage. So it’s that gray zone where something might look ‘2002-y’ and people aren’t looking for that yet.”
What comes across the buying counter can determine the life span of a trend.
“When you see the super cool downtown kids start selling a particular item first, you know the trend is going to be big because they’re already getting rid of it. Then all of a sudden you’ll see that trend everywhere—Urban Outfitters, Sandro, Bloomingdales. So if we see it come across the counter, we’ll price it higher because it’s desirable. Once you see more brought in from customers, we start only picking the best of the best and pricing them a little bit lower. Eventually that trend will hit its low end and start to slow down because by then, most people already have it.”
Japanese shoppers are style-years ahead of you.
“It’ll be three of them, maybe a guy and two girls or one girl and two guys, who have flown in from Japan and barely speak any English. They’ll go through the store with empty suitcases and buy thousands of dollars worth of stuff. I always pay attention to what they’re buying because it’s always going to be the trend in three years. It’s always true. It’s happened to me at every Buffalo Exchange I’ve worked at. They know they’re the trendsetters!”
People are embracing trading and selling better, faster.
“There definitely has been a shift. The idea of selling your stuff instead of donating used to be foreign to a lot of people. Back in the day, if you had something of value, you’d put it on eBay. It also seems like we held onto stuff longer. When I first started working here, customers would bring us stuff from a couple years back. Now they’ve worn a trend all season and are over it, so it’s still really current but they’re selling it to us anyway. People are always looking forward to what the next thing is and are more in touch with when they’re done with a piece of clothing, they’ll get rid of it.”
Trunk Show Designer Consignment
Born and raised in Harlem, Heather Jones noticed her hometown lacked the fashion retail presence that the rest of Manhattan had. In 2012, Jones opened Trunk Show Designer Consignment, a small space just a few blocks north of Central Park in Harlem that could double as a high-end brand’s boutique.
“We checked the demographics and we knew people had the money here. It was just a matter of getting people accustomed to shopping luxury items uptown,” says Jones. “We want to create that ambience. We don’t want you to feel like you are rummaging through dirty old clothes.” Jones works one-on-one with her clients, accepting items that are in pristine to mint condition and assessing the selling point together. The item is offered at the shop for around 60 days and the split is 50 percent.
The shop serves to a very specific clientele.
“They’re young, hip fashion-enthusiasts. We don’t deal too much with vintage or pieces that are more than five years old. If it is vintage, it has to be very trendy and happening. Nothing stale and stuff. We want our pieces to be high-end. That’s the niche market we cater to. We like to carry designers like Balmain, Marchesa, and Saint Laurent. My favorite piece in the shop is this Margiela biker jacket. It has a neoprene structure inside and a leather exterior.”
The focus is on stocking up on what’s in demand.
“We get things that you’ll find at Barneys, Bergdorf’s, and Intermix. Usually it’s the on-trend stuff that people purchased one season prior, are now over it, and want to buy more. So when they bring those things to us, our turnaround is fairly quick. If people aren’t really thinking about it, the item will sit in our store. But if it’s hot, it’ll go.”
Technology at its finest: You can also consign via social media, too.
“People can direct message us on our Instagram account with photos and details of what they want to sell so you don’t have to be physically at the store. If it meets our standards, we’ll sell those items remotely. It’s a service we can offer if you’re abroad.”
Or snag pieces as soon as they hit the shelves are posted on Instagram.
“Instagram has been our main outlet. It’s so viral. We once sold a Chanel bag in an hour. We posted it on social media and this girl said she was looking for a Maxi and we had the perfect price. We literally had her come into the store right away and make the transaction.”
Ongoing relationships come with the ongoing business.
“I like to build relationships with longevity with my store. It’s not just a one-time thing where you accumulate a bag of stuff, drop it off and say, ‘Do what you want with it.’ This is real contact, back and forth. Once things sell then we’re going into the next season, gathering spring stuff or summer stuff and then wrapping up for fall. It’s an ongoing business and my clients are really happy. We’ve definitely gotten some international recognition, too. We just had someone come in from Paris. He was staying for the week and brought me two items to sell.”
Beacon's Closet
For the past four years, Alia Bistranin has been training the buying team at Beacon’s Closet with her vintage know-how (she once found a pair of original Air Jordan 1s in Queens for less than a dollar). But in order to actually get behind the buying counter, the interview process requires a quick test of how well you can recognize brands, good quality, and trends.
“The practice bag is basically the hodgepodge of what you would actually see in some of our buys. From that process managers can see and gauge an individual’s eye,” she says.
Once you’ve gotten the job, buyers-in-training go through four days of shadowing a senior buyer on their shifts. “We also like bringing our newer people out onto the floor. It’s one of those things where it’s just such physical learning. Knowing what real silk feels like even if there isn’t a label. Knowing what cashmere feels like and definitely knowing what polyester or double-knit polyester feels like.”
Every few months each buyer is assigned to visit shops throughout the city, from Opening Ceremony to Strawberry, in order to gain more knowledge about clothing and accessories and also find out about trends and price points.
A tag can tell you everything.
"The tag alone can tell you the style and condition of a piece and where something is made might be indicative of its quality. But always leave leeway when you’re formulating an opinion. The biggest mistake we can make is not buying something in. I tell buyers it’s like a two-out-of-three thing. Maybe it’s a good brand and it’s current but maybe it has a little wear. In that case, we might buy it in as is. Or if any of those variables are switched around we kind of consider it that way to buy in. If it’s two strikes, then it might be a harder sell and we might hold off on a piece."
There’s a difference between bad condition and good character.
“Almost any piece of vintage is going to have some wear to it. It’s just expected and it’s important to know what is character in an as-is piece and what just might be too much of a distraction for someone to wear it. If there’s a hole or a stain on the front, that’s where you should hold off. A small button missing or something very fine about it but adds to the character of the piece, we might buy it.”
Your stuff might actually be too expensive.
“We have a low cap to be honest. The most we really go is maybe just under $300. And then the main reason for that, regardless of what comes in here, the main goal is to provide product for our market. Sometimes there are things that are out there that are at such a high price point, it’s hard for even us to gauge. In which case we’ll tell you what we’d price it at. We’re very honest about it. There’s no reason for us to not be. We really are a part of this community and we do have respect and a lot of love for people who sell. We’re up front about how the business basically works.”
Beacon’s myths—and negative Yelp reviews—debunked!
“We sell our donations or we take out of our donations: Total myth. We have so much respect for the charities that we work with. Personal buying is another. Sometimes we’ve heard on the Yelp reviews, ‘There’s so much attitude!’ First off, we’re a very big store and one person’s personality doesn’t reflect an entire store. If somebody isn’t the most outgoing, a lot of times it’s because when we’re behind that buying counter, there’s a lot of questions we ask ourselves internally while looking at a piece. That balance is a little tough trying to carry conversation and focus on doing a buy at the same time.”
Your stuff didn’t sell? Don’t take it personal.
“It really isn’t a personal decision. We always go off of what will sell for the store. Not everybody is going to know every single thing about what pieces we take in but we also try to gauge as well as we can and try to be very well-rounded. It’s not that we might not like this piece—it might be because it’s not selling as well as it used to for us and that’s just a matter of fact because we still, at the end of the day, are a business. We have to really pay attention to what will sell, and what won’t sell.”
Crossroads Trading Co.
