Second-Hand Clothing Apps Are Ruining Thrifting

I used to donate my unwanted clothes to my local Salvos and feel like I was doing a good deed. 

I mean, I still do drop by a donation bin every time I do a closet clean-out, but now I’m often bombarded by the same question from friends: “Why didn’t you just sell it?”

In the past month, Vinted, Europe’s leading second-hand fashion marketplace, launched in Australia. It joins platforms like Depop, Facebook Marketplace and Whatnot, all competing for a share of the booming resale market. Vinted’s biggest selling point has been its “zero seller fees,” which they have emphasised in every single one of their advertisements. Depop responded by swiftly removing their own seller fees, and now every resale ad sounds the same. Every platform wants to convince us that selling our clothes has never been easier.

But honestly, I don’t care how little I have to pay to sell my clothes on your app. Dropping a bag of old clothes into a donation bin has always been free.

Don’t get me wrong, I do understand the appeal of resale apps. They’re convenient, they put a bit of money back in your pocket, and they encourage people to buy second-hand rather than new. It just concerns me that these platforms have moved away from highlighting the sustainability of buying and selling pre-loved clothing in favour of having a marketing catfight. I don’t want to hear about which platform’s user experience is the smoothest, I want to know how many articles of clothing each company is keeping out of landfill each year.

All this petty drama distracts from the wonderful (and completely free!) experience of donating clothing you no longer want to op shops in return for the experience of treasure hunting through other peoples’ cheap donated items.

Resale apps have completely destroyed the magic of thrifting for me.

At the end of the day, the goal should not be to manipulate people to choose one resale platform over another; it should be to encourage them to choose reuse over waste.

So whether you upload your old jeans to an app or drop them off at your local charity shop, the important thing is that you’ve given them a second chance at life.