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The undeniable epicenter of the hardcore thrifting world is “the bins.” Thrifters are known to travel over a hundred miles to shop these tubs from open to close. Ethan was elbow deep in unwashed clothes for over an hour. Bumping into people and shoving carts out of the way, he rushed from bin to bin when he spotted it: a particularly shiny silver zipper glinting under the lights.
This is Ethan Lupo. He’s a professional clothing reseller and has been for the last several years. Ethan has over 1,000 active eBay listings and moves well over $100k worth of inventory through his store every year.
Ethan runs his operation out of his home. Most of his day is spent working with his inventory. Whether that’s washing the clothes, photographing and packing them, listing new items he thrifts, or reviewing his queue of sold items he needs to ship out, there’s always plenty to do now that his store processes so many items.
Items are numbered corresponding to their listing to speed up the picking process.
With so many active listings, he can’t keep his entire inventory onsite. Ethan rents a storage locker not far from his house. This way, he’s able to safely store and quickly grab his sold items and mail them on his way to thrift stores.
While the majority of the business can be run from home, his entire inventory would dry up within months without the consistent flow of new merchandise. To show me what it takes to maintain that volume, he took me directly to the source.
The Goodwill Outlets are larger than the average Goodwill location. Overflow and old clothes from the retail stores get moved to the outlet locations for their final chance to be bought. Merchandise is rolled out in unsorted bins filling the warehouse. While many of the items have their old price tag from being in the retail location, clothes here are sold by the pound. $2.09 per pound to be exact. Clothes that aren't sold to the public are shipped out to wholesale companies overseas.
Ethan scanned clothes as fast as he could. He grabbed a piece on his left, checked the tag, and tossed it to his right. Ethan opted not to wear gloves. He knew feeling the fabrics bare-handed was the best way to find cashmere, heavy wool sweaters, or real leather. When he spotted something he liked, he would pull out his phone and run through a mental checklist to confirm the item was worth buying.
Ethan found a wool sweater and began his research on eBay. Have there been any recently sold items like this? If so, how many? How much are they going for? How many active listings are there? Are there more sold listings than active listings? How frequently are people buying? How long are the listings sitting before they are bought?
The mental checklist he went through made it clear what kind of shopper he was. Ethan wanted the best return for his time spent. He could have bought half the items in each bin and sold them all for a slim profit, but that would take more time to process and wouldn't net him as much as if he were more strict with what he was going to walk out with. If he could make just as much money off two good items as he could twenty poor ones, then why waste the time photographing and packing more items than he needed to?
After asking why they chose to shop at the bins, Keegan responded, “You’ve gotta be in it to learn, and [the bins] are all the way in.”
After the chaos of the opening hour ended, most of the bins had been sorted. More experienced thrifters like Urban (right) went through their cart and helped new thrifters Keegan (left) and Micah (center) determine what to look for when going through the bins.
In a pile of their discarded clothes, Ethan spotted an army jacket that he threw over his shoulder without hesitation.
"I've sold a jacket exactly like this one before," he said, explaining why the newer sellers passed it up. "These are hard to look up since they don't have very descriptive tags and aren't branded at all."
Ethan immediately identified it as an M-65 field jacket given to soldiers throughout the Vietnam War. M-65s made after 1970 were made with brass Scovill zippers, but the silver Rapid zippers were used from 1965-1970.
By checkout, Ethan had found four pieces weighing in at just over four pounds. For $8.78 he took home an L.L. Bean Chamois, a Carhartt hoodie, a wool sweater, and the M-65 field jacket. Ethan expected to sell the field jacket for as much as $100 and the rest of the pieces in his typical price window of $25-$30. Between driving, shopping, packing, and listing, he expected a profit of over $175 putting his hourly rate at $58 showing exactly why thrifters brave the bins. In the hardcore thrifting world, a trained eye can turn a few discarded jackets into an efficient and sustainable business.
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