Thoughts on being in a reseller.
If you asked me a few years ago if I ever would have thought of becoming a reseller...I would have called you crazy. I'm a merchandiser, a mother, a designer, a creator, but throw a pandemic, two small kids, supply chain issues, global warming, a potential recession at a woman and she is bound to reconsider all her life choices.
Being trapped at home with minimal time to work on creating beautifully designed garments for your littles, while dealing with my own was just not going to happen. I had to pivot my business and it took a while to come up with a solution that was literally staring me in the face, that pile of outgrown baby clothes taking up valuable real estate in my home was a goldmine. Then the wheels were starting to turn if I have this problem every other mom has this problem. So, I began to reach out to other moms and slowly build up a stock pile of outgrown children's clothing till the seams of my studio were about to burst. Then the slow process of photography, writing descriptions, placing value on each item and uploading as much as I possibly could online to my site.
After that came the waiting, and waiting, and waiting for the world to know I was back online. Let me tell you it took a long while and lots of educating myself about SEO, marketing, social media and goodness knows what ever scrap of information I could absorb to make this dream work. I will be honest with it's still hard, and a lot of work to get it going and keep it going, but I will share with you what I have found helpful so far.
First let me make this clear before you start educating yourself and prepare financially. Do I have the available funds to take courses and money to live off of when I am not making any money. We are lucky in the situation that we are in, meaning that we could afford to do this, but also I have been the designated stay at home parent for the last 9 years. Working part time here and there doing custom pieces and seamstress duties for the last 5 years.
I had been wanting to go back to work for a long time , but the hurdles employers make you jump when you have been out of the mainstream work force, with outdated skills are enough to send you into tears. I had to educate myself, create a name for myself, and give purpose to the time spent away. So, I made a Udemy account and started the process of arming with knowledge to use as my leverage to employment. As much as I learned on Udemy, it wasn't enough to gain me the job I so desired, because I hadn't worked for a large company in 9 years. So, I revamped my hand made clothing business into a reseller of second hand clothing.
I figured having anything that is representative of employment was good enough, even with minimal sales under my belt. I was on the road to employment ( part of me still feels that way), could I do it though? Return to 40+ hours a week. Evenings, weekends, holidays all being taken over by a company of people who care little about us and our families. I still struggle with this, I can't work the way I used to. Having two kids and the randomness of a busy mother's schedule would I be able to keep a job. Especially after hearing about all the awful stories from other moms who left or were let go during the pandemic, because they had families and couldn't commit to the demands from all sides. After thinking about all of this for some time, self employment was starting to look like a better option for me. I had to make this work and I knew Tik Tok was not going to explode my busy and I just plan suck at dancing.
So, in waltzs a Posh Mark ads on my social feeds daily. I thought, why not... because I suck at dancing. In my first week as a POSHER I made close to $300 in my "Closet" ( that is the name for your sellers page). Then I fell down the rabbit hole of youtube with tips and tricks from successful full time Posh Mark sellers started watching them while doing anything. Here are a few I found to be helpful;
These are just a couple of the Youtube Creator/ Posh Mark resellers that I have been learning from, there are so many more out there.
So far Posh Mark has been kind to me, let's give it a couple more months to really develop a full opinion on it. Till then I will be dropping small nuggets information here and there.