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Mimbre Alden
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One night in 2016, Rachel Petersen got up at 3 a. . m m. , looking to rock her six-month-old daughter to fall asleep. In the morning, she began another 12-hour shift as a nurse at a hospital in Chattanooga, Tennessee, but more than fatigue, she was struck by anxiety and stress. He had worked part-time in the hospital for seven years without an increase. With a training assignment at a local university, she controlled to invent $35,000 a year; Her husband earned a similar amount. Meanwhile, they had an older son, a young boy, who began to show symptoms of autism. While sitting in the mecedora in the baby’s dark room, she scrolled through Instagram on her phone, where her eyes rested on the hashtag #resellerrevolution.
It saw publication after publication of women boasting of changing second-hand outlets for profit. The women seemed independent and owners of their lives. Many of them used a platform called Poshmark and marked their messages as #girlboss and #poshboss. Don’t wait to find out more,” he says. He fell into the rabbit’s hollow until two hours later, when he left to begin his shift at the hospital. That day, he took credit for a break to see more messages. She had credit cards to pay for and a glimpse of concept that her 3 massive containers of garments that don’t fit her can help.
After spending a few months learning about designer brands and taking note of trends and costs on the site, he tried to list his own used items and then started buying more garments to sell at nearby second-hand stores. A year later, he quit any of his jobs and went to the carpet in Poshmark, which in 2018 generated $80,000 in revenue.
Petersen had encountered a developing trend. Several corporations are helping others sell their old garments online, but Poshmark, a San Francisco-based startup, is the largest in the group and has 60 million registered users, mostly women, who live in almost every U. S. zip code. But it’s not the first time Some women claim to earn tens or even thousands of dollars a year.
When businessman Manish Chandra introduced Poshmark in 2011, he imagined the app as a marriage to Facebook and eBay, a social network aimed at shopping. App resellers list their pieces in a “poster” or virtual storefront, and classified ads represent the percentage of the look. and the feeling of posts on Instagram and Pinterest. The echo is intentional. The women in the app “look at themselves as friends than as customers,” according to a previous press release, which classified them as ads to buy more of each than a stranger.
The app has grown rapidly. In May 2018, Poshmark reported paying a total of more than $1 billion to its seller network; Sixteen months later, the number had doubled and the company was reportedly valued at $1. 25 billion.
The secret to Poshmark expansion is that it has no inventory. Other retail sites, such as ThredUp, Vestiaire Collective and The RealReal, buy used clothing from consumers, then authenticate and resell it. At Poshmark, users make all the paintings themselves, however in return, distributors can earn more cash on both one and both items they sell. “We have built a highly distributed logistics system, in which millions of suppliers provide services, products and inventory,” Chandra told me in an interview in early 2020. Poshmark gets 20% of the value of the sale for any value greater than $15 and $2. 95 for any value less than $15. The customer covers the fixed shipping payment of $7. 11 on the order.
An important goal, according to Tracy Sun, co-founder of Poshmark and senior vice president of new markets, has been to “allow a whole new generation of distributors to start their business and thrive. “In Poshmark’s television commercials, women say she paid for family circle vacations, a car and a wedding using the app, and Poshmark presented an “Entrepreneurship Fund” for women to buy inventory.
Petersen temporarily excelled in Poshmark with his exuberant photography and unique brand. “She fed my artistic aspect that I missed as a nurse,” she says. She was one of the first Poshers, as they are called, to design the clothes herself. of hitting them on a flat surface, installed a photo room in his room with a background and an annular light, spent time editing the images to make them transparent and white, adding his favorite flowers, peonies. and built a presence on Instagram.
Over time, he began driving two hours to Nashville and Atlanta, with the youth in tow, to dig into Goodwill’s liquidation containers. “I was looking to get more inventory, more inventory,” he says. I enjoyed the thrill of hunting.
Rachel Petersen quits her nursing job to sell used clothing on Poshmark full time.
Poshmark is one of the corporations that talks about everything missing in the task market. Few tasks offer the desirable combination of a living wage, flexible hours and the ability to be your own boss. Poshmark seemed to be offering an answer: a simple way to start your own store and, as noted in a 2013 press release, start earning around $20,000 a month. But as Petersen discovered, there’s only one problem: the hours.
She estimates that she spent 16 hours a day, seven days a week, fully committed to the application. “My children were home all the time. While I ran errands with them, I would take them to gymnastics or swimming, share things, record things, edit shots on my phone,” she says. His space was messy, with trash cans full of clothes and accessories. We had to pack and send. He slept between 2 a. m. and the 6 a. m. Su husband looked at the young men as she saved. However, “there was never enough time to do everything. I stayed up late to take pictures once the young children went to bed,” he says.
In March 2019, Petersen earned $10,000 a month, which was a triumphant milestone. I’ve never reached five figures before. He made a YouTube video with tips on how to make more sales. But her tiredness was hard to hide, even her best makeup. In the video, his smile is a little stiff. “The last few weeks have been kicking me in the ass,” he says. But I think we see the kindness at the end of the tunnel. “
If you download the Poshmark app, you will soon be greeted through an avalanche of notifications that look more like a life coach or yoguini exhortations than an e-commerce platform. “Decide your mood,” says a notification. I know the explanation for why someone smiles today, ” said another. Also: “Give yourself the rest you deserve. ” The application radiates feminine heat and positivity. In a recent speech, Chandra, the founder, reinforced the emotional message. “you run with love, the cash arrives, ” he said. When you run with the cash, nothing comes. “
A word more accurate than love, however, can be just commitment. Joshmark is not only an e-commerce platform, such as eBay, Shopify or Amazon, it is also a social network, with subscribers, comments and likes. Sellers who interact aggressively with the app are more likely to be detected through buyers and close a sale.
Poshmark and its suppliers announce a symbol of the female entrepreneurial spirit.
At the center of the app, for example, is ‘share love’. Sellers are strongly encouraged to “share love” by selling classified ads from their competitors in their own feed. “If you only keep your items, never get more subscribers and more discoveries,” Chandra told TechCrunch in November 2019. “So it’s in your most productive interest to manage other people’s items,” he said.
Sharing is necessarily a market location tool for distributors and it takes time. But the app’s superusers, the serious Poshers who post tips on how to make promoting on Poshmark a chore, say that sharing is just the beginning. They proposed joining common “parties”, sales of organizations for a limited time around a theme, such as Best in Bags or Everything Plus Size. Participating dealers will need to be on the app to answer questions and negotiate offers. To achieve daily sales, distributors want to take multiple photos of each item they offer, answer questions from potential buyers within 24 hours, haggle with buyers about value, succeed with buyers who like their listings, conduct research worthwhile market. and advertise your classified ads on Instagram. Of course, if you want to be aware of your own business, you must take the time to market it. Most of the women who have to sell on Poshmark perceive it. But there was one special feature of the app that seemed unnecessary: to get noticed, resellers found they had to include all of their own classified ads as a percentage in their own feed. One by one. Everyday. If they didn’t, their classifieds classifieds didn’t sell or sell.
Other Poshmark vendors have complained for years about the servile and slow facets of the app. A 2016 blog post titled “Why I Left Poshmark” garnered more than three hundred disgruntled Poshers comments. “As much as I enjoyed the social side of bringing other wonderful people together in Poshmark, the time I spent on the app was ridiculous,” says writer Sydney Stone. “Four times a day during the holidays, sharing in the morning. At midnight, my husband would say to me, “Are you still elegant?”
At a party at Reddit earlier this year, vendors expressed concerns. “The amount of anxiety and intellectual tension Posh reasons us,” wrote a Redditor. “I don’t need to waste time following other closets, sharing other people’s belongings and sharing my own items. It’s crazy and tedious. But if you don’t waste time, you probably won’t make sales. “
A salesperson named Emily, who declined to use her last call because she planned to continue promoting on Poshmark, was reading economics when she started the platform to retrieve liquidated stocks from retail branches: “New With Tags,” in fancy language. She was interested in tracking her numbers and hit a $ 2,000 high consistent with the month in profit, while spending 15-20 hours a week on the app. “It was modestly habitable for a student,” she says. But her technique has not changed. “Working longer hours means more directory, buying more, packing more . . . I ended up spending more money, so I didn’t make a genuine profit,” he says.
Poshmark says that some of its most successful full-time brokers are other people who sell so-called “store” items, get their new stock on Amazon or on Asian wholesale sites. When I asked the company to show me complete success – a time runner who focuses on “posters” or second-hand articles, a journalist put me in touch with Tijana Lazic, a married mother from Los Angeles who works 40 hours a week.
Some say they appreciate the flexibility and freedom to run a virtual store in Poshmark, even if their revenue is modest.
Lazic says he makes a few thousand dollars a month by saving between $5 and $10 in pieces in Los Angeles and looking to sell them four times more expensive. If your estimate is correct, it’s about $24,000 a year, or about $12. 50 an hour for your efforts, less than Los Angeles’ minimum wage. When I point this out, she says she enjoys the freedom that comes with Poshing, which allows her to supplement her family’s source of income and send her children home.
Poshmark says one in five U. S. distributors on the platform identify as Posher full-time, but when distributors post data about their good fortune on the platform, they regularly only focus their gross income, not their profits after spending or the hours they spend. Petersen’s profit in 2018, for example, turned out to be only $30,000. When a potential trader asked Reddit for a recommendation on how to paint full-time, the answers were disappointing. “It’s GOOD more than a typical nineam to 5pm Array task. I do this almost every day . . . “Nothing like weekends/holidays/snow days,” one person wrote. “I’m lucky I don’t depend on my source of income and it’s just a holiday fund for me, ” said another. “I leave my homework too soon. I continued to use the cash from my sales to pay my expenses and I could never grow my business on a giant scale,” wrote a third.
A YouTube personality who goes through Rockstar Flipper says that in the resale communities he frequents on Facebook and Instagram, the vast majority of Poshmark distributors are part-time. “They don’t make more than $500 to $1,000 a month,” he says. They can’t go beyond the numbers of the units and they don’t perceive why. “
Even for very informal sellers, this can be a bad deal. “I enjoyed it at first,” says Melody Olivera, a Bronx marketing professional who joined because it seemed to be the easiest way to get back some of the money she spent. garments for herself. ” Just put it in a box, put the label on it and polish it. “But he soon realized that with all the paintings needed to list and share, the sale required about an hour of paintings and brought in an average of $5 in profits. After promoting 20 items, he dropped and deleted the app from his phone. “At the end of the day, I, as a professional, don’t have time to do that,” he says.
Chandra pointed out to me that Poshmark provides assistance that its distributors would not otherwise obtain, such as loose selling software, and only takes one cup when an item is sold. He also noted that distributors did not want to buy advertising. It also turns out that its distributors never discover what second-hand retailers like Buffalo Exchange knew a long time ago: the maximum of our old garments are worth much less than we thought. Far.
That’s the tension in the center of Poshmark: whether you’re just looking to leave your closet blank or treat it like a small business, for the time you have to invest to interact with the app, you’re very unlikely to earn more than the meagers back up promoting old clothes. Joshmark is less of a path to entrepreneurship and more of a gateway to the task economy.
In the summer of 2019, Rachel Petersen struggled more to get closer to her first issues. “Sales are down,” he says. She had hired a part-time teenager to help her send and had rented a workplace to concentrate. As a greeting Mary, she used her air miles to buy a flight back to Los Angeles and spent four days cleaning trash cans in search of a clothing designer. “I sent boxes and boxes to my house, and I checked two suitcases,” he says. Even with this great transportation, it has reached $7,000 in revenue stream consistent with the month.
Other merchants also complained about that year’s low sales. (Poshmark declined to comment). Then came the Covid-19 crisis and the economic recession affected women especially harshly. the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking him down.
Poshmark seemed to be offering a lifeguard. The promise of monetary freedom is a recurring theme at this year’s Poshfest, the company’s annual celebration. In recent years, suppliers have purchased tickets for $229 to make contacts and have fun together; Last year’s assembly was held at the Phoenix Convention Center. The october virtual occasion of this year focused more on professional development. Expenses of $25 were exhausted. This coincided with an exciting moment for the company, which had just submitted the documents for an initial public offering.
When I expanded the conference, I discovered two brown and cheerful MMs encouraging participants to introduce the the participants to perform at least five new “PFF” (Posh Friends Forever). The zoom was blurry and failed, so participants flooded the loose YouTube live video and the Parallel Chat lit up with Poshers appearing.
On a convention panel, several vendors explained how the platform had helped them with the crisis. “When I got fired in July, I turned it into something positive,” said a speaker named Christine. Joshmark partnered with Goodwill in the spring, where the charity sent mystery boxes full of products to vendors. (The quality of the boxes was so low that it was thought to be a failure. )But the query that attracted my interest the most was to develop and scale your business. A panelist named Ilinca (@herstory_thrift) admitted that he was suffering to turn sales into a pandemic. “It’s been hard, I’m not going to lie, ” he said. ” I swim a little in my inventory. “
Another panelist, Lynn (@lynnsclosetllc), said she joined the app in 2012 and is a full-time saleswoman. He has been employing a full-time worker and two independent contractors and rented offices for a year. Instead of promoting used clothing, tarimas. de uns sold settlement stocks from retailers. He found it useful to have several identical, new and classified pieces of popular brands in quantities high enough to require a warehouse for storage. That’s how he succeeded in his business.
But the ultimate enlightening recommendation comes from Jane (@iridessegray), who is married and has some other source of income as a home owner. When asked to call anything she stopped doing and helped her grow her business, she said bluntly: “Share. That’s the most vital thing. ” She hired a nanny to supervise her children and a member of the family circle to share for her.
The last consultation I joined was moderated through Nicole Couloute, who holds a master’s degree in accounting and is now in independent accounting rate for resellers. She began promoting on eBay in 2008 and Poshmark in 2016, and presents a podcast called Every Day Is Payday. She’s also an accountant Petersen. Si to know how to monetize Poshmark, it would be her.
His speech accompanied through slides. In one of them, he had made a calculation: to earn $1,000 a month in revenue, he had to sell 25% of his classified ads at an average value of $20, and would like to list 8 pieces per day, or 240 pieces. . one month.
The comments were broken. ” 240 pieces?! sacred cow. I feel like I want to go back to scaling MY BUSINESS’s escape hahaha,” wrote one. “You’d better start running harder . . . I only have 90 pieces in my closet YES!the user replied.
When I had Couloute on the phone the following week, he spoke frankly to me: “Poshmark, I would say, is the lowest in terms of all the other options in which I make money,” he says. “You have to share, you have to do more things to make the sale, compared to eBay, where I just list it and about it. “But she says Poshmark facilitates the sending procedure and manages the service to the visitor, which balances the extra time she spends on the application. she developed tricks. It deals with second-hand retailers to get what they can’t sell and makes “gift for posts” on Instagram, which gets you loose clothes in exchange for logo posts.
Nicole Coulotte, independent eBook creator for Poshmark ers, is lucid about the time and paintings needed for Poshmark.
When I told him about Petersen, who had damaged his back in Poshmark, he said, “Rachel puts a lot of effort into her photos. She personally models her clothes, does make-up, everything works. Peter had been invited through Poshmark to share his percentage. “Photography tips at Poshfest 2018, but according to Couloute, his photography complicated a while ago.
Couloute told me about a friend who killed him in Poshmark (and she saw his finances). She indexed some secret resources of designer stocks at uns sealed prices, such as a Hervé Léger dress they gave her for $8 and returned the app for $200. “She’s a direct con man,” Couloute said, “I feel like other people have understood it, others haven’t. “
I have an idea of the 2500 most elegant participants, many of whom probably haven’t learned what it takes to earn a decent salary with the app yet. At a time when more and more women are in survival mode, hiring a nanny to take Poshing’s time would possibly not be a realistic option.
When I compared those considerations to Tracy Sun, the co-founder, she said, “We have a developing network of other people who have transitioned to other full-time sales people, and came here to Poshmark with the goal of promoting full-time. ” she said. It’s kind of glorious that I encourage. ” When I told him that sharing has become a painful point for those sellers, he reaffirmed that sharing is”at the center of Poshmark. “You’ll need to be able to physically focus” each ad.
Poshmark attracts women because it gives them flexible pictures and allows them to stay basically at home, which contributes to the fantasy that in sufficient haste, they will make a lot of money from their old clothes, stay out of the sale and pay a great holiday while they are there. But its possible product design options have turned the act of sale into a time-consuming, questionable social painting. “Here’s the thing. I would say it directly to Manish’s face if he asked me”Petersen said of the founder: “If the platform was originally intended for men, I don’t think there was anything for the percentage of love. I feel like this is fueled by women’s desire to have validation from other women. “
Last fall, Petersen and her husband made the decision to divorce amicably. Using some of what he had learned about Poshmark marketing, he introduced himself to manage the social media accounts of local small businesses. She is now single and gets a normal source of income. income as a full-time social media manager for a clothing liquidator, as well as for a manicure salon and furniture store. Their schedules are still long, but they are higher than with Poshmark. “Until the pandemic, I hadn’t given myself a single-free day in three years,” he says. With his new career,” in spite of everything, I let me take a day off on the weekend and spend time with my kids. If I’m exhausted, I can say, “I can take care of this tomorrow. I don’t have to stand till midnight. “
It’s been almost 4 months since you arrested Poshing. Es you may have five persistent lists in the app. “In fact, I don’t know how hard I’ve worked to death,” he says. But he doesn’t regret it. Despite his court cases on the platform, he says that joy has strengthened his confidence.
“But,” she adds, “I’m pleased to have a task now with a stronger salary that I don’t have to grab and grab every day. “
In 2020, that makes her a lucky woman.
Model: Amanda Lanzone