From $50 to $4.2M/Year Sneaker Reselling Business

[Music] a side hustle Tia Hall started out of her dad's garage now earns $350,000 in monthly revenue for these two women once you see how much of this $350,000 Tia and Anastasia keep you might drop everything and start selling sneakers yourself our online orders off the chart these are not supposed to be there at all that was an easy way that we found that you can make money with those two things we've built so many reoccurring customer custom I'm going to give it a sniff how's it smell I I can tell that I can tell that's real yeah and we'll even show you how to start your own reselling business with only $50 big thanks to Taylor brands for sponsoring this video Welcome to a new episode of upflip my name is Caleb poer and we are here with Tia Hall and Anastasia Lemley how's it going so good to meet you guys thank you for having us yes so let's get right into it where are we standing and why is this place important it's basically outside of our personal house in North Seattle right now this is kind of where we begin our day we wake up we get our shipping done and then we head off to both of our stores to start our day of business all right Tia so you're the one who originated the business and Anastasia joined later on is that correct correct about 5 years ago okay great so tell us how you got into the sneaker business so basically I used to just go to the thrift store as a hobby and I eventually started to find some stuff in there that I was like hey I can make a little bit of money on this stuff so I would buy it take it home list it on eBay offer up so it was kind of just a rinse and repeat of that process until I was able to save up enough money to kind of do it at a larger scale when did you start your first store so I resold through my dad's garage he let me house literally everything in his garage for like two or 3 years and then it just came to a point where we couldn't fit anything in there he was kind of giving me dirty looks you know it was time to just make the move and grow the business and that's when we started to looking for our first brick and mortar spot uhhuh and that was in Seattle that was in North Seattle yes so I think you eat breathe and sleep sneakers in your business but what about in your personal life do you actually enjoy sneakers we actually do surprisingly enough as much as we see them we do have actually a pretty big collection if you want to go inside and check it out okay let's go okay let's do it so this is our personal sneaker collection here we have stuff that we wear every day some stuff that we don't wear every day so in the beginning would you organize stuff here and then take it out to the streets to sell in person uh basically yeah I mean we would keep the stuff at our house and if someone called us and they said they wanted to buy that pair we would load it into the car go to like a dark parking lot and just like sell the shoes so that's kind of why we've transition into store it's just a lot safer and we've definitely moved away from doing that okay yeah this one is actually kind of a fun one this is the very first Jordan ever made from 1985 so this is what 38 years old wow and it's still in great condition it's just a great collector's piece we don't I mean obviously it's too big for me to wear but it's just a cool uh piece to have in our collection what would you say makes your business what it is today I would probably say our ability to authenticate and make sure us she was not fake cuz that is a huge problem in the industry the most important aspect of reselling in sneakers is authenticity stay around to find out exactly how to identify a fake using Overlook details like smell and texture so let's get started with your day you say you started in the house and need to head to the store what do we need to do yeah let's go load out some boxes and then just head straight to the store hope your back's feeling okay today all right tell us where we're at now so we're at the Alderwood Mall now in front of our second location we actually just had grand opening this last Saturday so this spot is really new why did you choose a mall location well one thing that we struggled with with our first two locations was foot traffic they're both standalones so being in a mall obviously you get the traffic of the mall so that is the main reason why we want to be here just to get more customers through the door our other two locations were destination spots so people had to just want to come to our store here we get people just walking by a lot more exposure and it's something we've always wanted to be in the mall but lot higher cost here and it's just something we weren't ready to jump into at the very beginning and I feel like now we're a little bit more confident with the costs and yeah we're excited to see what it brings yeah what's the price point at how much are you paying for rent we're paying 13 13.5 here if somebody's just getting started and they don't have a lot of money what's the best way for them to get into the industry first thing is to have a job I mean these shoes are expensive it's not something that you can just jump into if you don't have a good job or if you want other ways to make money I think doing like we did going into the thrift stores and finding stuff that people donated that you can take home clean and add value to it and then resell it online for a profit that was an easy way that we found that you can make money it's a lot easier to spend $5 on a shoe and sell it for 25 3040 than it is to spend 200 on a shoe and try to sell it for 220 240 most people have an extra five bucks in their pocket then they would 200 you know and then once you build up the money doing that then you can jump into some of the more expensive shoes which obviously have higher profit margins but to just to start out I think you should build up your Capital as much as you can first okay you mentioned how to get started but is there a particular skill that somebody needs to be in this business I think the biggest skill is being able to negotiate learning how to talk to people cuz you make your money when you buy the shoe right you don't always make it when you're selling it you have to get it at the right price to get your profit margin so making sure you're locking in the price that makes the most profit for your business is probably the best skill that you could have negotiating the purchase of your next sneaker pair is the bread and butter of this business so unlock your secret negotiation Powers keep watching as Tian Anastasia show you how it's done okay where are we at now all right so this is our tuckwell location basically the headquarters this is where a lot of the business operations happen we get our our large shipments in here clean a lot of shoes here we ship the majority of our items from here and yeah this is basically where where we house a lot of our inventory yeah a lot of it you're now in a much larger store 2200 ft so how did you know that sneak city was ready for that move and how did that help you grow your business I think we ran into the same issue that we did going from her dad's house into our first location we just ran out of space we had shoes all over the floor in Fremont we had shoes in the back that we couldn't even come to the front we had shoes at the house that we couldn't bring into the store so having a bigger spot to house more was definitely the next move that we were ready for but it mainly came down to space yeah we moved from 400 ft to 2200 ft so it was just something that needed to happen and I think we have pretty much filled up this space so we definitely are growing very fast all right so here at the store can you guys show us a little bit of the layout of this and how you chose it the right side that we're looking at this is all individual size so each size has its own section because most people when they go shopping they don't want to look at every single shoe they want to know exactly what you have in your size so if you're size N9 you go to the size NES and you can find everything we have over there and then on this side over here what we call quote unquote bulk or multiple sizes as you guys can see we have six or seven of the exact same shoe on on each one so these ones we'll have anywhere from a size five up to a size 13 and we do label everything that way it's easier for everybody to find I'd say the stuff on this side it's kind of like your everyday you know you see this stuff a lot more and then on that side it's more curated it's a lot more of the rarer stuff so if someone's specifically looking for something more rare they'd probably find it on that side in the middle of the store we do have quite a long clothing wreck all this stuff that is in bags is stuff that we essentially don't want people to get their little grubby fingers on it's a little bit more expensive so we do keep it wrapped and then a lot of this stuff is very popular Street Wear Brands and then a little bit cheaper items here and then at the very front we have our own personal merch we have quite a bit of it we do a lot of traveling and make special merch for every event that we go to they're like sneaker Expos so we travel all over the us and we make specific merch for that exact event that way when people come up to the table cuz they want to meet us we make a shirt exactly for the city that we're in so this one is from Washington DC see but we usually try to do a monument of any sort from that exact City and then up behind Tio over here this is our grade school or our women's sizes it's hard to keep this stuff in stock women do love their shoes so they sell out pretty fast in these guys but as well as our bulk we keep a lot of those ones in women sizes as well what would you say has been the biggest factor of your success definitely our reputation being able to spot fakes being able to authenticate thousands of different shoes as well as our online presence with those two things we've built so many reoccurring customers people that come in store and a lot of customers that buy online repeatedly as well so this is very different than the other location so tell us about setting and how much that matters um so basically as soon as you walk into the door you're going to see our huge front counter right here people that are looking to sell will come straight to the front counter and then it's kind of set up the similar way as the mall it's kind of by size so we got smaller sizes from the bottom bigger sizes going up and then they go all the way down so again come in shop by size and then if you're looking to sell you'll come right up here tell us about your team structure who's where and what sort of managers do you have in place uh we have our general manager Joe who kind of swings back and forth between bull stores he knows pretty much anything that we would know when it comes to buying pricing customer service he's pretty much you know just a one man Do-it all type of thing which is really nice hard to find and then we physically are in the stores every single weekend and then throughout the week we're kind of just you know on call whatever they need we're here and then two employees at each store every single day yeah if things are slower on the week a why have two people why not just one safety is one thing and then the second thing is we do get a lot of shipments in from people that are selling to us and then sellers come in as well so having two people to be able to process shoes and get everything listed on the website and have everything organized all the photos are taken nicely shipping is taken care of it's just easier for two people to do it then one do you ever watch these episodes and think it's great that they're making all these recommendations on how to handle a team how to get a good one but right now it's just me no team so F flip could just recommend me how to get started in my business that'd be great if you've ever thought that that's why we want to introduce to you Taylor Brands here you can go get your business set up as an LLC and get everything you need to make your business an upand cominging completely covered Venture you can get all the things you didn't know you needed in one place such as licenses and permits business documents business insurance a business bank account and tax experts that specialize in getting small business owners the maximum deductions and the best part you can start your business absolutely anywhere so if you want to get started right now without a hassle use Taylor Brands thanks for watching and make sure to check out Taylor brands in the description below and now let's get back to finding out how much these two women are raking in what are your average monthly revenues today and how much profit margin are you seeing on that a typical month is about $400,000 and we're seeing about 20 to 30% profit margin on that 20 to 30% every month okay welcome what are the biggest costs for a shoe reseller and how do you keep these prices low boxes for sure even starting out with your shipping items your shipping boxes so what we do is reuse boxes if you order from Amazon a lot or anywhere else reuse those box to save them the other thing we do is find a bulk supplier that way we can buy a thousand at a time right now our box cost is about a dollar a box so we have to counter that into our sales as well about how much of your revenue is from online sales versus at your retail locations I'd say it's probably 5050 between our online Market as well as our two storefronts okay is there an item that sells better online versus in store definitely the higher end or the higher dollar items move better online and then in store I'd say like the $2 to $400 range um that's like the money spot for Stuff selling in store yeah so why do you think that is I think we have a just a much larger Reach online and then in person it's kind of just our everyday sneaker head you know maybe not looking to spend that much every single day so the $2 $400 range is just you know yeah fits most people uh sometimes yeah yeah why is it important for people to have a niche as a reseller and how do you identify that early on I think it's important to stand out individuality in this is very important there's 10 sneaker stores around us what makes us different from everybody else and what makes them different from us you know I think it's very important yeah I think what makes us Stand Out is we make sure that every single thing that we have inside our store is listed online as well it's really laborous but it makes a huge impact because people that can't physically come shop in the store they can see it online and buy it so it's a good conversion rate for us and I feel like it just makes the shopping experience a lot better yeah you have a 130,000 subscribers on your YouTube channel yes how long has that been two years started two years okay well tell us about that how has that grown your business I mean I can't even explain how much it's helped our business T and I are both pretty introverted and shy and just like in our own little bubble with our small friend group so even starting YouTube was a huge leap for us it was a huge uncomfortable thing for us to do but after we posted our first video we saw the results right away our online orders off the charts the people that came in to visit us said hey I saw you on YouTube never knew you guys never knew about your store what you guys were doing so it's honestly changed our lives yeah I I would say if you're even hesitant about starting YouTube or getting yourself or your business online just do it anything that you're going to grow from is going to make you uncomfortable and that's kind of what we told ourselves we were really like oh should we start the YouTube should we not and we kind of just put the camera up and just kind of went for it and we grew over time and so did the business can you share some advice on a seller using YouTube to grow their business yeah I think customers and people in general just really appreciate transparency so the more that you can put on YouTube about yourself about your business people are going to appreciate that rawness not really they look really fake to me so I probably wouldn't recomend like selling them to anybody and be drawn to it I feel like that's what a lot of our viewers appreciate and that's why they watch is because we literally put the camera up they see what we're paying for the shoe they see kind of the everyday operations and people like to watch that kind of stuff okay so you're actually posting videos of your interaction with customers yeah unedited for the most part and just pretty much raw transactions yeah all right can you list every social media platform that you guys are on all of them Tik Tok Facebook Instagram YouTube literally anyone that we have access to we're we're on there we want to blast our name our business on every social media platform that we can and which of those are the most beneficial and how do you engage on them I think the most beneficial ones would be Instagram and Tik Tok I think if you post reals those are really popular right now I know I sit in bed and I watch reals at night and so if you post reals and Tik toks you're going to get your business or whatever you're trying to do in front of people's eyes you're posting shoes that are brought into the store on your social media and how quickly are those selling once you post them sometimes instantly sometimes as soon as we post it it'll sell we have a pretty big turnover of the stuff that we add on to our website it sounds important to post them then it is it's we definitely it's one of our main focuses throughout the day tell us about the best place to buy items through to resell I think if you're starting out definitely offer up eBay now obviously you do have to be a little bit careful with offer up cuz there's a lot of fakes or people that you could get into a bad situation with when you are doing a meet up can be scary yes definitely so as a business has grown have you changed where you get your items from I feel like now more so we buy a lot from people that come into both of our brick and mortars we still Source online a little bit but as far as like meetups and off up and stuff we don't do that as much anymore only because we have people that come in and sell us do you have a guess as to what the percentage is of how much is coming from people bringing the shoes into store uh I'd probably say it's up to like 80% of Walkins people selling to us and then 20% of customers emailing us uh collections or different stuff they want to sell us that they would ship in what platform do you use for your online store and why uh we use Shopify we found that it is the best integration with our in store as well as our online and the fact that it's so user friendly we can have six devices between our employees and US using it without any hi hiccups at all there are some cons that come with it though we do have to pay a pretty high transaction fee so we pay almost 4% for every shoe that we sell on there and then uh a monthly cost as well and when it comes to storage are you guys sending out from the inventory in your store how does that work yes all of the inventory that is in either store is listed on our Shopify website so it just makes it streamline again for shipping when something sells online or in store it's in store and ready to go out yeah and when it sells online it marks it out of stock on our POS and then vice versa it sells in store it marks it aut of stock on our online okay so anybody watching right now could see your whole inventory of this in your store they definitely could yes all right all right Blitz questions so you have 10 seconds to answer these can you do it yes all right let's go North Idaho handyman asks with the economy tightening people tightening their purse strings what do you recommend selling on eBay now and do you believe that this platform will increase or decrease in profitability yeah I think eBay is great for pre-owned shoes which have great profit margins so eBay 100% all right next question is do you still find enjoyment and what you do at this level totally we still enjoy waking up every morning and knowing that we're going to work for ourselves and building our own business what apps do you use to purchase for inventory to sell because I've never encountered a real person on Facebook Marketplace or any other app and they always end up being scammers uh again eBay they have great buyer and seller protection so it's just you can shop with confidence you can sell with confidence on there all things wack asks your biggest cue for a sneaker drop definitely download the Nike sneakers app turn on your post notifications from them and then just go on social media go on Twitter follow any sneakers account so you guys can find everybody talks about releases when they come out and get up early all the hot sticker drops are at 7:00 a.m. so make sure you're up and ready to click that button okay great why did you decide to open a brick and mortar location instead of keeping it online because you've had so much success online we honestly really did try to keep it online as long as we could you know the overhead expenses scared us and we just figured that if we create a brick and motor location people could come to the store and we could display all of our inventory and have people just shop instead of having to post everything online and just go do meetups it was safety convenience and just a lot easier for us as well I think a big thing of it was also timing Tia had just graduated college at the time I was working at Boeing I had gotten laid off when they did their big layoffs so both of us had more time to actually be in a physical location so that's I feel like when we really were like we can do this now this is a good timing to do so well that's another reason why we went for a 400t spot because the rent was a little under 1,700 it was pretty low risk and they let us sign a year lease so we kind of figured like hey if it doesn't work then it's only a year and kind of just took our risks there yeah what are the advantages and disadvantages of being at a physical location the main advantage is being able to display all your inventory in one centralized location build rapport with your customers build relationship and then just be a part of the local community MH and receiving new product in exactly y yeah okay so what are some of the disadvantages security is a big thing um overhead is a huge thing you're paying rent Insurance security utilities you just are paying a lot more every single month what's been your biggest mistake or failure as a business owner and how did you overcome it the only time we've ever felt like giving up or quitting was actually two weeks before our grand opening of our very first store 3 or 4 years ago we had been broken into I think it was like 10 days before our grand opening was supposed to be someone backed their car into our store broke all the glass ran in in the middle of the night I think it was like 3:00 a.m. took like $20,000 worth of clothes and we had pretty much drained our bank account to fill fill that store with product so it was just like a huge blow to not only have grand opening 10 days away but have that much product taken away from us since then we've really stepped up our security we've realized that a lot of these shoes are expensive and it's a high Target for theft so we spent a lot of money on security cameras roll down Gates even an overnight guard we we pay for which is a big expense so it kind of makes sense to be in a mall cuz you're not going to be having somebody drive in and smash their car into the front yeah that was another main reason why we wanted to come in here for more insights on how to start an online clothing reselling business go watch our episode 49 on the upflip podcast where we interviewed the founder of a $2.9 million per month business unique vintage all right so we talked about negotiation and how important that is you have to have that skill if you're going to be in this business so can we actually see a real life example of what a negotiation would look like yeah let's take you in the back and show you how to negotiate okay all right so if I'm a seller I'm coming up to the counter and say hey I've got these shoes I want to sell these are the S Heap and Berry Crocs in the black colorway we're just going to take a look at the Box make sure all the fonts on the box label look good we're going to open up the shoe we got these stickers that mean it's goat verified which is another uh Marketplace online that does authentication and shoe sales we're going to take it out going to look over the shoe it is brand new condition going give it a sniff make sure give a sniff yeah that's good Howell I can tell that I can tell that's real yeah okay perfect and then when we go to reference our prices we go on stockx so we'll look this up we'll go sahi bber Croc we'll see right here this one is a size 12 men looks like this is going online for about $100 right now and retail on this is about $85 so there's not that big of a difference there I know we would list this in our shop for probably around 120 130 and then to get that profit margin I usually would just take 130 * 30% need to make at least $39 on this shoe so we'll take 130 minus 39 so I'll probably offer the seller around $90 but if I'm the seller and I come up and say Hey I want $120 for this shoe I know it's going for around1 but I think you guys could sell it for a little bit more than that we try to work with the customer I want them to leave happy we want to be happy we try to meet a middle Grand so we are going to list it for like around 130 so i' probably the most I could probably offer you is around 90 can you do 95 yes I can perfect so even a $5 difference can make a big impact she leaves happy we're happy with the price that we got it at and the profit margin is still there so are people constantly looking to get ridiculous prices or are people kind of know what the market value is honestly it really just depends on the person some people come in and they understand the concept of the store so they'll even tell us hey this is what it's going for I want x amount I know you guys have to make a little money on top to and then other people come in and they want exactly what's shown online exactly what that shoe is valued at so we do have some people that we don't buy from only because the margin is not there for us so it doesn't make sense for us to buy the shoe how often are people walking away without making a deal I'd say our close rate is probably close to 70% it's pretty high the experience we want the customer to be happy we want them to bring the shoes back in the future so we try our best even if we're not making the full profit margin we try our best to take the shoe okay how many people do you have on your sneak City team so including Tia and I we have six so four employees and then us two and we're very close-knit team we're friends outside of work we go get dinner all the time as well yeah I think it works best if you're really friends with the people that you work with and obviously in this industry you have to really trust the people that you allow into the store just because there's so much expensive stuff and um we've just built really tight-knit relationships with our teammates and something that I actually really cherish so what is your day-to-day role in the business and how does the planning for that go like do you start here come up with a plan and then head to the shops it's definitely changed over the years me and anastesia physically used to be in the shop 1100 to eight every single day for like 2 years straight but we slowly brought on teammates and now our day-to-day life is to make sure both stores are stocked and just be the rightand man to our employees if they need any help so before you were saying that what keeps your reputation high in this industry is your ability to spot a fake shoe so can you show us how to spot fakes yeah definitely so this is a shoe that someone actually was shipping to us to sell to us we deemed that it was not authentic but we do keep them for you know educational purposes for our videos and for our employees but the main thing that we saw with this shoe uh you take the black light out and you're going to see these marks on the toe box there okay yeah kind of see along that along the toe right there these are not supposed to be there at all they're called Stitch guides Stitch lines um a lot of the fake companies will put these on their shoes kind of to show where they're supposed to stitch and Nike I've never seen a Nike shoe with that so that's the first red flag that I saw with this shoe and then another thing is the smell test smell test what's that tell me what you smell when you smells very chemically chemically yeah exactly so Nike shoes each of them have a certain smell but when you get such a chemically Like Glue smell that is it is a huge red flag and then on top of the Stitch guides along with the smell and then the box as well is this is almost too bright so you really just have to pay attention to the small details I mean the everyday person is not going to see these and be like oh they're fake so you really do have to be detail oriented and kind of know what you're looking for yeah how about texture texture is a huge thing with Fakes too I mean when you squeeze it you can kind of just feel it feels a bit flimsy mhm like not real leather a bit plasticky yeah it's just once you feel hundreds of pairs of dunks and shoes a day you kind of get to know like how they're supposed to feel they're not supposed to bend super easily this is actually not too bad of a fake this is one of the better fakes I've seen but sometimes the shoes will like you'll be able to take it and literally like go like that yeah but this is not too bad but some of the fakes that I've seen um the materials are pretty bad yeah all right so I would have no idea how to spot this as a fake aside from maybe that test but How could somebody new to this industry start becoming a professional at that uh I'd say the number one thing is to get a black light I mean this is the very first thing that we do we just shine it with the black light so that's most important yeah and then smell box texture always look at the Box label sometimes there's a sticker on the inside of the Box those should have certain indications on there as well how do you stay organized and manage your day-to-day workflow took us a while at first yep try to be the most efficient that we can we used to take home all of our shoes and ship them at home after we got home from work and we realized oh maybe it's smarter to ship them out the shop while we're already there so just over time we've learned kind of our flow and we have it down to a daily routine now I mean we come in here in the morning we get all our shipping done and then from there we focus on adding more shoes to the website and helping customers in store are there Sops you have in place and how did you develop those to be honest I wouldn't say that it's necessarily uh this this this in this or like an operations essentially we've just learned over time like Tia said of when we get a new item in we clean it make sure it's presentable we take photos we price it and we get it listed on our Instagram and then it does make it to the website instantly and then it hopefully it sells we pack it ship it and then rinse and repeat okay so what happens when you receive a shoe is it going into a system the prices Yeah so basically this shoe we just got it in we have the price that we paid right here either I on a sticky note on a sticky note not always sometimes that's the easiest way for us to do it but we have the price that we paid myself or Anastasia one of our employees will price it from there it'll go back into the photo station photos will get taken it will get listed onto the website and then I'll hit the shelves and then I'll just wait to sell okay and then that times how many other rep repairs we get in throughout the day what extra challenges are there for a woman-owned business in a male-dominated industry ooh sneakers are definitely more male focused I try to just take the approach you know we have the same similar interests we both like the same things we're both here for shoes and so I just try to relate with guys on that aspect I mean it's definitely different for a guy to walk in here and see you know two females behind the counter but I try to treat everybody the same no matter what gender I mean it doesn't really matter to me and that's a wrap I hope you enjoyed this episode if you want to see another entrepreneur who started an online clothing boutique go check out our interview with urbanity owner Lee Smith who makes $112,000 per month [Music]

Channel: UpFlip

Views: 706,030

Keywords: sneakers, sneaker reselling, how to resell sneakers, sneaker reselling tips, sneaker reselling as a teenager, sneaker reselling business, reselling sneakers, how to start reselling sneakers, reselling sneakers for beginners, sneaker reselling tip, reselling shoes, reselling business, sneaker reselling journey, sneaker reselling challenge, how to make money reselling shoes, sneaker flipping for beginners, sneaker business, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, business, upflip

Id: dJryzKeGwtU

Length: 28min 10sec (1690 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 24 2023