How does thrifting work in India?

In recent years, the segment of thrifting has picked a fast pace in India. Most fashion influencers and Instagram users have been operating their thrift stores successfully with people happily finding unique pieces of clothing and accessories at a fair price and working their wardrobe. Most of the thrift stores are usually running on Instagram. From managing the posts to communicating with the consumer, and handling prices, descriptions, and queries, let’s learn more about this new style of online shopping.

Online thrift shopping sites carefully curate a collection of a handful of products and then post the details of them on their social media platforms waiting for the customers to bag the products. Once the consumer confirms their booking, the payment mode is merely chosen and shared over DMs, and after the confirmation, the shipping details are sent out within 24 hours, and thus the product gets delivered. These sites only have one piece of each outfit, thus it works on a first come first serve basis.

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Managing the orders is a tough process as when the clothes go live on the website, consumers start writing ‘book’ in the comments, and within minutes these stores are required to scroll through all the comments and then reach out to the people one by one and let them know that they have locked the order for them, which can get overwhelming at times. If the first person refuses to take the booking, it automatically goes to the second person.

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One of the most common challenges faced by consumers on Instagram is fake and scam pages. They churn out the posts mentioning the details about the outfit, contact the individual interested complete the booking and payment process, and then eventually ghost you. There have been hundreds of cases on Instagram with fraud and scam pages having thousands of fake followers and running a scam page which makes the consumer confused and hesitant to purchase from the legit thrift stores as well.

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You first need to select your niche in fashion and then move forward. Whether you are interested in clothes, accessories, footwear, handbags, or clothes only if you’re only interested in selling jeans blazers, or tops, thus you need to start with a niche. You can then pick from pre-loved and used clothes in good condition or factory-rejected items and thus contact the right individual accordingly, have a marketing vision for your page, and move forward with the order.

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Thrifting is mainly a foreign shopping concept as countries like the USA and the UK have large offline thrift stores that sell unique and stunning outfits and accessories at a reasonable price rate. In India, there are a handful of thrift stores that are running on at small scale, as people mostly prefer online thrift shopping stores. Some of the popular offline thrift stores in India are Vintage Laundry, KikiKloset, and Rerunn.

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