When it comes to fashion bargains as well as any ol’ kind of everyday stuff, your local Goodwill store is the place to find it.
However, times are a changing and Goodwill has found itself eating the digital dust of online competitors such as RealReal and Poshmark.
As Business of Fashion reports, Goodwill has gotten hip to the digital resale game.
Here’s more from TheRoot:
After decades of watching folks clean up on eBay or Etsy with their donated finds, Goodwill has decided to partner with mobile marketplace OfferUP to offload some of their most covetable items to the highest bidder.
We can’t say we blame them; as BoF reports, the resale industry is currently a $24 billion market. Goodwill’s 3,300 stores alone generated $4.29 billion in sales in 2017, which primarily goes toward maintaining its vast network of stores and workforce (whose jobs are often part of the “goodwill” the nonprofit provides).
But given the success of sites like the RealReal (which recently filed for IPO), Poshmark and more, Goodwill apparently isn’t leveraging its 117-year-old assets as well as it could, and a long-overdue image overhaul may be the result.
“We sell all of the same brands as those platforms do, like Louis Vuitton, Hermes, Givenchy, and Gucci,” said Joseph Jarroush, Goodwill’s vice president of retail operations in New York and New Jersey. “We compete with the RealReal every day and have been looking at different avenues to make consumers aware. The partnership with OfferUP will give our listings a national audience.”
Though Goodwill has long had an identity on eBay, by utilizing OfferUP’s ability to amplify local sales, the app also provides a draw to customers in a given area, a benefit apparently tapped into by Goodwill employees, who inspired this partnership by using the app to promote and move product in their respective stores. According to OfferUp’s vice president of community Natalie Angelillo, most Goodwill items on the app sold within 72 hours.
Get the rest of this story by TheRoot at MSN News.
