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Sure, there are parents who responsibly sort their children's outgrown clothes into boxes for consignment and donations before driving them to appropriate locations. But there would probably be a lot more of them recycling clothes if the process instead involved throwing all items into one big garbage bag and setting it on the porch for the mailman to pick up.
Clothes-swapping startup ThredUp is now offering that option through a new service called ThredUp Concierge. At its website, users can sign up to receive a bag with a pre-paid shipping label. (Starting in March, receiving a bag will require a $5 deposit.) Then they simply fill it with clothes and send it back. Thredup sorts the clothes it will donate to charities such as Goodwill from the clothes it will resell online, and it credits the previous owner's PayPal account upfront for the later.
The startup's core business model involves swapping rather than selling. Parents who register for its original service (about 250,000 so far, according to ThredUp) receive shipping boxes in the mail, fill them with outgrown clothing and toys, and list their contents on the site. Other parents can then choose to have those boxes shipped to them. For every box a family ships, it can sign up to receive one from another family, paying just shipping costs and a small transaction fee.
But that's a lot of work.
""[ThredUp Consignment] serves another segment of consumers who wanted to be a part of what we were doing, but didn't have the time or bandwidth," ThredUp CEO James Reinhart says.
Reinhart believes ThredUp can make up the expensive shipping costs it's fronting with the resale of packages' contents, and he has been busy building a warehouse operations team that can handle the sorting bonanza that will soon commence on its property. Within the next few weeks, ThredUp will use the inventory it pulls from its geen-polka-dotted garbage bags to launch an online store for used children's clothing — something that could eventually prove more profitable than transaction fees from swapped boxes.
Thumbnail image courtesy of iStockphoto, kativ
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