Finding New Money in Old Threads
A day in the life of a vintage clothing reseller
By Charles Maxwell
“It’s basically just a bunch of teenagers scrambling around a warehouse trying to find the oldest piece of clothing they can before somebody else snatches it up,” says Gabriel Leeper, adding, “It’s mayhem.”
It’s 6:45 a.m. Leeper, an 18-year-old vintage clothing reseller, prepares to drive to the Orange Blossom Trail Goodwill outlet 30 minutes south of his home in Winter Park, Fla.
Leeper, a first-year business student enrolled in online school at the University of South Florida, purchases donated clothing items by the pound- $1.89 per pound, to be exact- and resells them online.
“I started buying vintage shirts for a personal collection my senior year of high school,” says Leeper. In the fall of 2021, Leeper was a 17-year-old who had just found an interest in vintage clothing. “I just liked the way it looked, and everything I would buy had a story behind it. Everything I own is part of history,” says Leeper.
After acquiring a collection of around 70 t-shirts during his senior year, Leeper decided it was time to let some of them go. He began to promote his clothing on social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, mainly selling his clothing to people locally. Shirts he would purchase for less than a dollar were sometimes fetching hundreds of dollars at resale.
He explains the value behind vintage clothing. The clothes he finds from decades ago were made with a quality that simply doesn’t exist today.
As he hops in his Ford F-150, Leeper points to the pair of denim jeans he’s wearing, manufactured in the late 1950s. “You see all these patches sewn on all around the pants, and all these messed up little stitches?” says Leeper, as his intensity rises, “These were all added on to the jeans at different points in time over the past 70 years, and there’s not another pair in the world identical.”
He arrives at the Goodwill (which is just a glorified warehouse) around 7:50 a.m, ten minutes before the store opens. He waits outside the front door in a single-file line with about 30 others. Half the people in line are kids like Leeper, vintage treasure hunters hoping to find gold. The other half are families looking to find affordable clothing.
“Once they open the front door and let us in, we’re going to divide into five single-file lines,” says Leeper. “Then from those lines, they’re going to let three people from each line enter at a time, and then we’ll go stand next to the bins.”
The “bins” are what the store uses to hold the clothes. Each bin looks like a small blue dumpster on wheels, containing hundreds of different clothing items piled on each other. Every hour throughout the day, the Goodwill employees roll out a brand new arsenal of bins, and the same line-up and search process repeats. These are called “drops .” There are six drops every day.
The store manager opens the door at 8 a.m sharp, and the shoppers file in.
“It’s like a competition, but it takes a lot of luck,” says Leeper as he walks into his line. “I have no idea which bin will have the best clothes. You have to hope the bin you choose to search through first has what you’re looking for, and you can be the first one to find it.”
When the manager calls on each group of three to enter the area containing the bins, the customers hurry over to their bin of choice but don’t start looting just yet. “You’re not allowed to touch anything until she [the store manager] says you can,” says Leeper.
Leeper chooses a bin and waits eagerly, picking apart the bin in his mind.
“Three,” says the store manager as she paces in front of the bins, ensuring everybody is calm and in order. “two… one! GO!”
Chaos ensues.
Each shopper quickly picks apart their bin. Clothes are thrown around in the air as they dig through the bins, sometimes landing on the floor, but there’s no time to stop moving. If there’s nothing they like in the first minute or so of searching, they move on to another bin.
A look of frustration begins to form on Leeper’s face as he struggles to find anything worth keeping. The search and move cycle continues for about 15 minutes until most of the “good stuff” has already been looted, and all Leeper is left with is “scraps,” what vintage resellers call worthless pieces of clothing.
“Just a bad drop,” says Leeper as he walks over to a group of resellers sharing their recent finds, “there’ll be another one in 45 minutes.” After enviously looking over the other shopper’s hauls, Leeper finds a seat on a bench at the front of the store and waits to line up for the next drop.
The process continues. The drops keep coming, and so does Leeper’s lousy luck. He’s now spent three hours at the store with nothing to show.
Leeper finally finds his first item of the day during the fourth drop at 11:15 a.m. It’s a 1990s Carhartt denim jacket he found wedged between a shower curtain and a floor mat in the bottom corner of one of the bins. Leeper estimates the jacket will sell for around 80 bucks.
He finds a few graphic t-shirts in a different bin and then decides to call it a day. He brings his haul to the register, where he is asked to place his items on a scale. The total weight of three and a half pounds will cost him seven dollars. He bags up the items and heads back to Winter Park.
“I’ve had better days, but I’ve also had much worse,” says Leeper. “Today I got four items, tomorrow I might get nine, but I could also find nothing. It’s not always about how many I get though, a lot of it is whether or not they’re gonna’ sell.” When Leeper returns home, he carries his newly purchased clothes into his at-home workspace, the garage. He photographs the pieces before hanging them up on one of his clothing racks.
Leeper then begins the process of trying to sell his clothing, posting the photographs to his Instagram page, @waitinondeath. He’s accumulated over 200 followers organically, solely by word of mouth. He uploads the products and starts messaging potential buyers. “I put in like 40 hours a week right now, on top of my part-time job, just to see if I can get this stuff going for real,” says Leeper.
While he loves his work, Leeper contemplates whether or not this could become his future and turn his side hustle into a full-time career. “Some people make five grand a month,” says Leeper, “a lot of people barely break even.”
