One night in 2016, Rachel Petersen was up at 3 am, trying to rock her six-month-old daughter to sleep. She was exhausted. In the morning she would start another 12-hour shift as a nurse at a hospital in Chattanooga, Tennessee. But more than fatigue, she felt overcome with worry and stress. She had worked part time at the hospital for seven years without a raise. Together with a job teaching at a local university, she managed to cobble together $35,000 a year; her husband made a similar amount. Meanwhile, they had an older child, a toddler, who was beginning to show signs of autism. As she sat in the rocking chair in the dark nursery, she scrolled through Instagram on her phone, where her eyes alighted on the hashtag #resellerrevolution.
She saw post after post of women bragging about flipping thrift-store clothing for a profit. The women struck her as independent and in control of their lives. Many of them were using a platform called Poshmark and tagging their posts #girlboss and #poshboss. “I couldn’t wait to learn more,” she says. She fell down the rabbit hole, until two hours later, when she left to start her shift at the hospital. That day, she used every break to look at more posts. She had credit cards to pay off and a glimmer of an idea that her three huge bins of ill-fitting clothing could help.
After spending a couple of months learning about designer brands and taking note of trends and prices on the site, she tried listing her own used items. Then she started buying more clothing to sell from nearby thrift stores. She was a natural. A year later, she quit her two jobs and went all in on Poshmark. In 2018 she pulled in $80,000 in revenue.
Petersen had stumbled into a growing trend. Several companies now help people sell their old clothes online, but Poshmark, a San Francisco–based startup, is the biggest of the bunch. It has 60 million registered users, mostly women, living in nearly every US zip code. Some women claim to earn tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars a year through it.
When entrepreneur Manish Chandra started Poshmark in 2011, he envisioned the app as a marriage of Facebook and eBay—a shopping-oriented social network. Sellers on the app list their items in a “closet,” or digital storefront, and the listings share the look and feel of posts on Instagram and Pinterest. The echo is intentional. Women on the app “look at each other as friends rather than customers,” according to an early press release, which leads them to buy more from each other than they would from a stranger.
The app grew quickly. In May 2018, Poshmark said it had paid out a total of more than $1 billion to its community of sellers; 16 months later, the number had doubled. The company has reportedly been valued at $1.25 billion.
The secret to Poshmark’s growth is that it doesn't hold inventory. Other retail sites, such as ThredUp, Vestiaire Collective, and The RealReal, buy used clothes from consumers and then authenticate and resell it. On Poshmark, users do all the work themselves—but in return, sellers can make more money off each item they sell. “We have built a highly distributed logistics system, where millions of sellers provide the service, merchandise, and inventory,” Chandra told me in an interview in early 2020. Poshmark keeps 20 percent of the sale price for everything over $15, and $2.95 for anything under $15. The buyer covers the flat $7.11 shipping fee on each order.
A core goal, according to Tracy Sun, a Poshmark cofounder and senior vice president of new markets, was always “to enable a whole new generation of sellers to start their business and thrive.” In Poshmark TV ads, women say they’ve paid for family vacations, a car, and a wedding using the app, and Poshmark has offered an “Entrepreneurship Fund” for women to buy inventory.
Petersen quickly distinguished herself on Poshmark with her lush photography and distinctive branding. “It fed the creative side of me that I had really been missing working as a nurse,” she says. She was one of the first Poshers, as they’re called, to model the clothes herself instead of laying them on a flat surface. She set up a photo shoot space in her bedroom with a backdrop and ring light. She spent time editing the photos so they were bright and white, adding in her favorite flowers, peonies. She made YouTube videos and built an Instagram presence.
Eventually she started driving two hours to Nashville and Atlanta, kids in tow, to rifle through Goodwill clearance bins. “I was always trying to get more inventory, better inventory,” she says. She enjoyed the thrill of the hunt.
Poshmark belongs to the ranks of companies that speak to a missing element in the labor market. Few jobs offer the desirable combination of a decent wage, flexible hours, and the ability to be one’s own boss. Poshmark seemed to offer one answer—an easy way to set up your own shop and, as a 2013 press release noted, potentially start generating $20,000 or so a month. But as Petersen discovered, there was only one problem: the hours.
She estimates she spent 16 hours a day, seven days a week, fully engaged with the app. “My kids were both home full time. While I was running errands with them, taking them to gymnastics or swim class, I would be sharing things, listing things, editing photos on my phone,” she says. Her home was a mess, with bins overflowing with clothing and accessories. There was packing and shipping to be done. She slept between 2 am and 6 am. Her husband sometimes watched the kids while she thrifted. Still, “there was never enough time to get it all done. I would stay up late taking pictures once the kids went to bed,” she says.
In March 2019, Petersen hit $10,000 in revenue for the month. It was a triumphant milestone. She’d never gotten up to five figures before. She made a YouTube video with tips on how to make more sales. But her exhaustion was hard to hide, even behind her perfect makeup. In the video, her smile is a bit too stiff. “These last two weeks have kicked my butt,” she says. “But I think we’re seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.”
If you download Poshmark’s app, you’ll soon be greeted by a flurry of notifications that seem more like exhortations from a life coach or yogini than an ecommerce platform. “Decide your vibe,” reads one notification. “Be the reason someone smiles today,” another one says. Also: “Give yourself the rest that you deserve.” The app exudes feminine warmth and positivity. In a recent speech, Chandra, the founder, reinforced the emotive messaging. “When you lead with love, money comes,” he said. “When you lead with money, nothing comes.”
A more accurate word than love, though, might be engagement. Poshmark is not just an ecommerce platform, like eBay, Shopify, or Amazon. It’s also a social network, with followers and commenting and likes. Sellers who engage aggressively with the app are more likely to get noticed by shoppers and therefore close a sale.
Core to the app, for example, is “sharing the love.” Sellers are strongly encouraged to “share the love” by promoting their competitors’ listings in their own feed. “If you only keep curating your items, you’ll never get more followers and more discovery,” Chandra told TechCrunch in November 2019. “So it’s in your best interest to curate other people’s items,” he said.
Sharing is basically a marketing tool for sellers, and it takes time to do. But the app’s super-users—the serious Poshers who post tips on how to turn selling on Poshmark into a job—say that sharing is just the start. They recommend joining frequent “parties,” time-limited group sales around a theme, such as Best in Bags or Everything Plus Size. Participating sellers have to be on the app answering questions and negotiating offers. To make sales day after day, sellers end up having to take multiple pictures of every item they list, answer questions from potential buyers within 24 hours, haggle with shoppers over the price, reach out to shoppers who like their listings, do market research on the price, and promote their listings on Instagram. Of course, if you want to be in charge of your own business, you have to put the time in to market it. Most of the women who have decided to make a go of selling on Poshmark understand that. But there was one quirk of the app that seemed especially pointless: To get noticed, sellers found they had to reshare all of their own listings to their own feed. One by one. Every day. If they didn’t, their listings languished unseen and unsold.
Poshmark sellers have been complaining about the menial, time-intensive aspects of the app for years. A 2016 blog post called “Why I Quit Poshmark” has collected more than 300 comments from disaffected Poshers. “While I did enjoy the social aspect of meeting some really great people on Poshmark, the amount of time I was spending on the app got to be ridiculous,” the author, Sydney Stone, says. “Four times a day for the parties. Sharing first thing in the morning. At midnight my husband would say ‘Are you still poshing?’”
In a gripe fest on Reddit earlier this year, sellers laid out their concerns. "The amount of mental anxiety and stress that Posh causes us,” one Redditor wrote. “I don’t want to spend time following other closets, sharing other people’s stuff, and sharing my own items. It’s mindless & tedious. But if you don’t spend the time, you won’t make sales.”
A reseller named Emily, who declined to use her last name because she plans to continue selling on Poshmark, was in college studying economics when she started using the platform to flip liquidated stock from department stores—“New With Tags,” in Posh parlance. She took an interest in tracking her numbers and maxed out at $2,000 a month in profit, while spending 15 to 20 hours a week on the app. “It was very modestly livable for a college student,” she says. But her approach didn’t scale. “Working more hours means listing more, sourcing more, packaging more … I ended up spending more money, so there was no actual gain in profit,” she says.
Poshmark says that some of its most successful full-time sellers are people who sell so-called 'boutique' items, which means they get their inventory new, often from Amazon or Asian wholesale websites. When I asked the company to show me a successful, full-time reseller who focuses on “closet,” or secondhand, items, a publicist connected me to Tijana Lazic, a married Los Angeles mother. She works 40 hours a week.
Lazic says she earns roughly a couple thousand dollars in profit a month by thrifting $5 to $10 items in Los Angeles and trying to sell them for quadruple the price. If her estimate is accurate, that comes out to around $24,000 a year, or roughly $12.50 an hour for her efforts, less than Los Angeles’ minimum wage. When I point this out to her, she says she enjoys the freedom that comes with Poshing, which allows her to supplement her family’s income and homeschool her kids.
Poshmark says one out of five US sellers on the platform self-identifies as a full-time Posher. But when sellers post about their success on the platform, they usually share only their gross revenue, not their profit after expenses nor the hours they put in to get there. Petersen’s 2018 profit, for example, turned out to be just $30,000. When a would-be seller asked on Reddit for advice on how to go full time, the answers were disappointing. “it's WAY more than a typical 9-5 job ... I do this almost every day ... no such thing as weekends/holidays/snow days,” one person wrote. “I’m lucky that we don’t count on my income and it’s really just a vacation fund for me,” another said. “I quit my job too early. I kept using my money from my sales to pay my bills and was never able to build my business to scale,” a third wrote.
A YouTube personality who goes by Rockstar Flipper says that in the resale communities he frequents on Facebook and Instagram, the vast majority of Poshmark sellers are part time. “They get stuck making no more than $500 to $1,000 a month,” he says. “They can’t get beyond these numbers and they don’t understand why.”
Even for very casual sellers, it can be a bum deal. “I loved it in the beginning,” says Melody Olivera, a marketing professional from the Bronx who joined because it seemed like the easiest way to recoup some of the money she had spent on clothing for herself. “You just need to put it in a box, slap the label on and send it out.” But soon she realized that with all the work it took to list and share, each sale required almost an hour of work and yielded, on average, $5 in profit. After selling 20 items, she gave up and deleted the app from her phone. “At the end of the day, me as a working professional, I don’t have time to do that,” she says.
Chandra pointed out to me that Poshmark provides support that its sellers wouldn’t get otherwise, such as free sales software, and only takes a cut when an item is sold. He also noted that sellers don’t need to buy advertising. But it also seems to rely on its sellers never discovering what thrift stores such as Buffalo Exchange knew long ago: Most of our old clothing is worth way less than we think it is. So little, in fact, that it’s hard to even give it away.
That’s the tension at the heart of Poshmark: Whether you’re just trying to clean out your closet or treating it like a small business, for the amount of time you have to invest in interacting on the app, it’s almost impossible to make more than a meager return while selling old clothes. Poshmark is less a road to entrepreneurship and more another on-ramp to the gig economy.
In the summer of 2019, Rachel Petersen suddenly found it harder to come even close to her earlier numbers. “Sales plummeted,” she says. She had hired a teenager part time to help her with shipping, and had rented an office so she could concentrate. As a hail Mary, she used her airline miles to purchase a round-trip flight to Los Angeles and spent four days scouring the bins for designer clothing. “I sent boxes and boxes home to myself, plus checked two suitcases,” she says. Even with this massive haul, she topped out at $7,000 in revenue a month.
Other sellers also complained about low sales that year. (Poshmark declined to comment on it.) Then the Covid-19 crisis hit, and the economic recession hit women especially hard. Female unemployment soared into the double digits this year for the first time since 1948, the year the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking it.
Poshmark seemed to offer a lifeline. The promise of financial freedom was a recurring theme at this year’s Poshfest, the company’s annual bash. In past years, sellers bought $229 tickets to network and party together; last year’s gathering was held at the Phoenix Convention Center. This year, the virtual event in October focused more on professional development. The $25 tickets sold out. It coincided with an exciting time for the company, which had just submitted the paperwork for an initial public offering.
When I Zoomed into the conference, I found two chipper, brunette MCs encouraging attendees to introduce themselves to at least five new “PFFs” (Posh Friends Forever). The Zoom was blurry and glitchy, so attendees flooded into the free YouTube live video and the side chat lit up with Poshers introducing themselves.
In one conference panel, several sellers talked about how the platform helped them during the crisis. “Being laid off in July, I turned it into a positive,” a speaker named Christine said. Poshmark played up a partnership it struck with Goodwill in the spring, where the charity sent mystery boxes full of merchandise to sellers. (The quality of the boxes was so low that it was widely panned as a dud.) But the session that most drew my interest was on Growing and Scaling Your Business. A panelist named Ilinca (@herstory_thrift) admitted she was struggling to make sales during the pandemic. “It’s been rough, I’m not going to lie,” she said. “I’m a little swimming in my inventory.”
Another panelist, Lynn (@lynnsclosetllc), said she joined the app in 2012 and was a full-time reseller. She employs one full-time employee and two independent contractors and leased office space a year ago. Rather than selling secondhand clothing, she buys pallets of unsold clearance inventory from retailers. She’s found it helps to have multiple identical, new-with-tags items by popular brands, in high enough quantities to require a warehouse for storage. That was how she made a success of her business.
But the most illuminating advice was from Jane (@iridessegray), who is married and has another income stream from being a landlord. When asked to name one thing she stopped doing that helped her scale her business, she said bluntly, “Sharing. It’s the biggest thing.” She hired a nanny to watch her kids, and a family member to do the sharing for her.
The final session I popped into was hosted by Nicole Couloute, who has a master’s in accounting and now does freelance bookkeeping for resellers. She started selling on eBay in 2008 and Poshmark in 2016, and she hosts a podcast called Every Day Is Payday. She is also Petersen’s accountant. If anyone knew how to turn a profit on Poshmark, it would be her.
Her talk was accompanied by slides. On one of them she’d done a calculation: to make $1,000 a month in revenue, you would have to sell 25 percent of your listings at an average price of $20, and you would need to list eight items a day, or 240 items a month.
The comments erupted. “240 items?! holy cow. I feel like i need to go back to the SCALING MY BUSINESS breakout lol,” one wrote. “I better start working harder … I only have like 90 items in my closet. YIKES!!” another person replied.
When I got Couloute on the phone the following week, she spoke with a frank practicality. “Poshmark, I would say, is the lowest as far as all the different places I make money,” she said. “You gotta share, you gotta do more stuff to make the sale, versus eBay, where I just list it and forget it.” But she says Poshmark makes the process of shipping easier and it handles customer service, which balances out the extra time she spends on the app. And she has developed tricks. She brokers deals with local thrift shops to get the stuff they can’t sell and does “gifts for posts” on Instagram, which gets her free articles of clothing in exchange for posting about a brand.
When I told her about Petersen breaking her back on Poshmark, she said, “Rachel puts a lot of effort in her photos. She personally models her clothes, does her makeup, the whole works.” Petersen had been invited by Poshmark to share her photography tips at the 2018 Poshfest, but according to Couloute, her fancy photography was a time-waster.
Couloute told me about a friend who kills it on Poshmark (and she’s seen her financials). She’s lined up a few secret sources of designer inventory at rock-bottom prices, such as an Hervé Léger dress she got for $8 and flipped on the app for $200. “She’s a straight hustler,” Couloute said. “I feel like some people got it in them, and some don’t.”
I thought about the 2,500 ticketed attendees at Poshfest, many of whom probably haven’t yet realized what it takes to earn a living wage using the app. In a time when more and more women are in survival mode, hiring a nanny to make time for Poshing may not be a realistic option.
When I took these concerns to Tracy Sun, the cofounder, she said, “We do have a growing community of people who have transitioned to become full-time sellers, and they came to Poshmark with the intent of being full-time sellers,” she said. “This is a wonderful thing that I really encourage.” When I told her that the sharing has become a pain point for these sellers, she reaffirmed that sharing is “at the heart of Poshmark. You have to be able to physically share" each listing.
Poshmark appeals to women because it offers flexible work while allowing them to mostly stay home. It contributes to the fantasy that with enough hustle, they will make good money off of their old clothing, keep it all out of the landfill, and pay for a nice vacation while they’re at it. But its product design choices have turned the act of selling into a time-consuming social exercise of questionable value. “Here’s the thing. I would say this straight to Manish’s face if he asked me,” Petersen says of the founder. “If the platform were originally geared toward men, I do not believe there would be anything about sharing the love. I feel like it feeds on women’s need to have validation from other women.”
Last fall, Petersen and her husband decided to get an amicable divorce. Using some of what she’d learned about marketing from Poshmark, she offered to run the social media accounts of small local businesses. Now she’s happily single and earning a steady income as a full-time social media manager for a clothing liquidator as well as a local nail salon and a furniture store. Her hours are still long, but they’re better than they were with Poshmark. “Up until the pandemic, I had not given myself a single day off in three years,” she says. With her new career, “I’m finally letting myself take a weekend day off and enjoy time with my kids. If I’m really worn out, I can say, ‘I can handle this tomorrow. I don’t have to stay up until midnight.’”
It’s been almost four months since she stopped Poshing. She has maybe five lingering listings on the app. “I truly cannot believe how much I worked myself to death,” she says. But she doesn’t regret it. Despite her complaints about the platform, she says the experience boosted her confidence.
“But,” she adds, “I’m really happy to have a position now with more stable pay that I don’t have to grasp and claw for every single day.”
In 2020, that makes her a lucky woman.
Model: Amanda Lanzone
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