Getting Vinted

Because it turns out I CAN shop second hand for things I like.

• 🥐 Croissants. A very simple first favourite this week. Laminated buttery pastry. While I love an almost croissant, a pain au chocolat, or a pain suisse, a standard croissant is an under-appreciated hero for me. On Friday morning I got up and dressed before 7am for the first time of the week, and rewarded myself with an iced coffee and a croissant in the cafe on the corner. It’s the little things. 

  

• 📚 Secretly Yours by Tessa Bailey. Wine country. Small town drama. Family legacies. Secret admirers. Love notes. Outdoor bad behaviour (wink). This novel has it all. If you like this, read Jasmine Guillory’s Drunk on Love next. (Bookshop.org | Amazon - affiliate links) 

•  🎶 Moody music. After last week’s summertime exuberance, it’s been a pretty tough week. I broke up be summer bops with a new ‘What a shame she’s fucked in the head’ playlist, based on the lyric in Taylor Swift’s Champagne Problems. Enjoy… I guess?

As part of preparing to move, I’ve been getting rid of a whole bunch of my possessions. I’ve sent two boxes of books to We Buy Books, taken about eight boxes of books to the Oxfam Bookshop, and the same number of bags of clothing and homeware to the Cancer Research shop. Once I’d got through that volume of ‘stuff’, I had enough brain space to look at the Vinted app for selling some of the clothes that were left.

And I’m hooked. Admittedly, I’ve been buying almost as much as I’ve sold, but that just means I’ve replaced clothes that I don’t wear with ones I will wear, in a cheap and sustainable way, so I’m not too mad about that. Before I started using the app, I was quite intimidated by it, so I thought I’d use this week’s newsletter to share what I’ve learned so far.

Selling

I’d summarise the three steps I’ve been following to sell things on Vinted like this: good brands, keenly priced, and well photographed. Here’s a screencap of some things I’ve sold as an example:

For every item, I take a picture of the front, a picture of the back, one of the main label, and one of the part of the label showing the fabric content. The pictures aren’t fancy, as you can see, but they’re clear. I have bundle deals set up, and when people offer a reasonable amount (for something that’s been listed longer than about ten minutes!) I almost always take it. Sometimes things sell almost instantly and I realise I could have priced them slightly higher, but usually I price things on the high end of what I expect to make from them, on the basis that that gives me space to take lower offers, or to reduce the price over time if it’s not shifting. 

I don’t do anything special in the listing wording - usually just a few sentences about the item, what sort of events or days it might be great for, and anything about the fit that would be helpful for the buyer. And when a dress or skirt has pockets, I usually put that in capital letters! For example, this Monsoon dress:

There are a range of postage options offered through the app, and you can go into the settings and switch off the ones you don’t want to use. I don’t have a printer, and I find it difficult to get to a Post Office inside of opening hours, so I just have Evri and InPost-to-Locker switched on. I’ve got an Evri parcel shop and a set of InPost lockers within about ten minutes’ walk, so those are both convenient enough for me. 

For packaging, I use purple mailing envelopes and matching tissue paper I bought from the Essex-based business Bag It Plastics (via Etsy). It’s an unnecessary extra flourish (and there are tonnes of videos on TikTok and Instagram making fun of the phenomenon of selling something for £3 and packaging it like you’re Rowan Atkinson in Love Actually), but it makes up for the fact that I’m absolutely terrible at folding clothes neatly, and I’ve had a couple of buyers give me positive feedback specifically on the nice packaging I use. 

It can take a while after you sell something for the money to reach your account - Vinted keep hold of it until after the buyer has received your item and marked that it’s fine, so you’re at the mercy of the couriers’ logistics network - but a nice thing is that you get the full ‘sticker price’ you’ve sold it for. On Vinted, the fees for the service - and the postage fee - are paid entirely by the buyer, so you don’t have to work them out in your maths when you’re deciding what to price an item for. 

Buying

When you first open the app, you see a hell of a lot of Shein, Boohoo, and Missguided. As I said to my friend the other week, I don’t want to be ‘misguided’, and I don’t want to be a ‘Pretty Little Thing’. Like many other apps, though, you can teach the algorithm what you like. You can save your sizes into your preferences, so the app will mostly show you clothes in the sizes you might actually buy, and by Following brands you like, it makes their products appear in your Recommendations feed more often. Then, it’s up to you. By saving items as favourites, even if they’re not quite right, you’re training the app to show you more like that. The best stuff can sell within minutes of being listed - so it’s worth remembering that what you see when you do an initial search after downloading the app isn’t the best indication of the kind of things you’ll be able to find over time. 

You can also ‘follow’ people on the app - when you find people who are selling clothes you like, there’s a good chance that they’ll have other clothes you like in the future, so this is another good way to train the app. And if you’d like to check out what I have for sale, I’m LilyMWrites there.

As someone who is incredibly picky about my clothes, tall, and also cusp-sized (I wear between a UK 14 and an 18 depending on the item, the brand, and the day), I’ve always liked the idea of second-hand shopping, but never had the success in charity shops that other people talk about. Vinted has been the game-changer for me. I’ve bought an And/Or (a John Lewis house brand) blouse for £8, a brand new FatFace dress for £20, and a gorgeous utility jacket with a little frill from American brand J Jill for £19. 

I don’t think this is the end of ‘buying new’ for me, but it’s definitely made it much easier for me to shop second-hand. In fact, it’s a little too easy, judging by the list of Vinted transactions sitting on my card lately… 

Speak soon,

Lily

Pull Up A Chair is a weekly newsletter containing all the things I’d like to be chatting about if we could hang out together in real life. If you’d like to access paid content, but can’t afford to, do ping me an email and I’ll happily give you free access.

PS: The Amazon affiliate links above only work to give me commission if you click through from the Substack app or website, rather than directly from your email program. Other ways to support this newsletter include liking, commenting, and sharing it with a friend who you think might like it. Thanks in advance!