I watch A TON of Poshmark reseller Youtube videos — all about their Goodwill bins hauls, strategies for increasing sales during summer slump, mistakes they’ve made with certain brands, and what sold for $100 or more. As someone who personally has almost never spent over $100 on an item for my closet, this fascinates me! Spending over $100 on a brand new item, let alone a used item online, is a big deal!
Of course since I started reselling I was hoping to get a triple digit sale, but you don’t run across an item to resell that’s worth $100+ every day. In fact right now with 132 active listings, I only have 6 items listed at $100 or more. So here’s the story of my first $100 sale — this stunning Helmut Lang jacquard jacket.
To see the jacket on a model and stock photos, here is the old listing on Shopbop!
I would roughly estimate that 95% of my Poshmark inventory comes from the thrift store, and this jacket was part of that thrifted inventory (I’d say the other 5% is from retail arbitrage and my personal closet). I found it in November of 2019, and when I saw the brand I was shocked. I had never found that designer before!
Let me tell you more about this jacket – the sleeves are 100% lambskin leather and the jacquard portion is a very vibrant orange and gray with a medallion design. The shape is boxy, cropped, and actually super flattering on! And guess what the retail price was? $995!
But RETAIL value doesn’t always translate to RESALE value. So I ran some quick comps on my phone while in the store to make sure it was worth buying, then dove deeper once I got home.
Once I got to my laptop I started running some comps more thoroughly and things were a little all over the place.
As you can see, despite retailing for almost $1000, most of these jackets sold on Poshmark for anywhere between $45 and $75. And then I went to see what the competition was like – how many of this item in the specific size I thrifted were actively listed? It turns out there was one listed for $150. Because I wanted to beat the competition, I listed mine for $125 and called it a day.
I did not expect this item to sell overnight for two reasons. First of all, it was in a size 0. Generally very small items don’t sell as well as larger or more common sizes. Secondly, people don’t just drop $100 on an item (and then don’t forget they have to pay shipping and tax on top of that!) every day. And Poshmark doesn’t allow returns for fit, so it’s kind of a risky purchase in my opinion. Over the course of being listed, the jacket was liked by only 5 people.
So the jacket sat for several months…until February 15, 2020 to be exact! While sourcing at the same place that I bought the jacket 96 days earlier I received an offer for $100 for the item. I immediately accepted and did a little happy dance inside! Considering what comparable sold listings went for, I feel like the offer was extremely reasonable.
There are three things I want to leave this post telling you – the first is that my ‘competition’ jacket originally listed for $150 is still for sale on Poshmark and now priced at $99. So you need to be able to price competitively to see your item sell! Better to price lower and have a faster sale in my opinion. You should be sourcing considering this!
The second thing is that I contemplated sending this jacket into the RealReal or thredUp instead of selling it myself. I have never done either of those things with any of my inventory, but I figured it would be a way to see some money back faster. I thought about doing this since sometimes I’m not sure how willing people are to buy used designer on Poshmark from a person instead of verified designer items from either of those reputable sites. But I guess it worked out that I was too lazy to do this!
And finally, I received a 4 star rating from this purchase with no feedback. Hmmm. I would have loved to know why the buyer didn’t give me 5 stars! The item was in amazing condition, but I wonder if I wasn’t prepared to package something in a way that was worthy of a $100 sale? I’ll never know! But no matter what the rating I still receive my payout and am able to move on with reselling.
Hopefully I will have many more $100+ sales on Poshmark in the future!
