FOR THE LOVE OF CHARITY SHOPS: a ‘fuck you’ post to DEPOP

I love charity shops! I exclusively shop second-hand, and I don’t need a medal! It’s just important to me. I don’t shop new because it goes against my values of sustainability and anti-capitalism. To me, upcycling and giving life to forgotten wardrobe pieces is one of the easiest things we can do to fight pollution and overconsumption. 

According to The True Cost, a 2023 documentary that peels back the curtain on the fashion industry’s environmental impacts, “The world now consumes about 80 billion new pieces of clothing every year. This is 400% more than the amount we consumed just two decades ago. As new clothing comes into our lives, we also discard it at a shocking pace.” That’s enough for me to recognize my impact. Can I, alone, change the entire fast fashion industry and prevent millions of tons of carbon pollution and waste? No. But I do what I can, and I believe supporting my local charity shops is a great way to jazz up my closet without adding to fashion waste. 

That’s my beef with Depop, a fashion resale platform that has edged itself into the way Gen Z largely shops ‘sustainably’. On Depop, users set up profiles, much like social media, where they post photos of vintage couture. Depop tailors what you see to your personal taste, and provides algorithmic categories to scroll through like “Gorpcore,” “Minimalism”, and “Seattle sleaze.” LOL. Huh?

Where’s the fun in that? Are the days of rack rolling, crate digging, and film finding over? Call me a traditionalist, but for me, a charity shop loyalist, the rise of Depop marks the end. I don’t think that I’m alone in how I’m feeling in this current Age of the Web.

Researcher Des Freedman analyzed Web 2.0, what we currently understand as the Internet and the principles it was built on. According to Freedman, the modern Internet was envisioned as “lowering transaction costs, stimulating innovation, collapsing barriers between producers and consumers and indeed handing a much more productive and integral role to what were previously seen as rather passive customers.” 

Freedman continues by comparing the “abundant storage space” of digital platforms to physical stores. Basically, your local bookshop can’t keep up with Amazon’s titles. Your local record shop doesn’t have half the content that Spotify does. And now, your charity shops cannot keep up with the abundance and convenience of Depop. All these choices, all this innovation, but who is really benefitting? Let’s take a look…

Depop runs a platform where individual users, or “shops”, post photos of their clothes to resell. They handle the package and shipping costs. They handle their own marketing, though Depop sorts shops and clothes using algorithms like hashtags and “most popular” features to find and connect shops with shoppers. All communication is to be done via the Depop platform. Depop collects a percentage of the shop’s sales as a fee. 

In this way, Depop functions as a platform to make money off of “user-generated content”, as Freedman writes. So, while individual resellers do make money off their sales, they are fronting most of the labor required to churn a profit such as sourcing, marketing, packaging, and shipping, while Depop just makes money by existing as a platform to conduct business on. This draws the democracy and abundance of the Internet into question. If users are fronting all the physical/emotional labor and costs for the sake of “individual earnings”, while Depop gets to profit and build its brand identity around the work of user-generated content… who is really winning here? 

I would argue Depop. I spoke to my friend, Devin, or @tinseltownproduce on Instagram. Devin, a fashion reseller in Los Angeles, has been shelling out vintage for over six years on various media platforms from Depop to Instagram. He’s ready to leave his brand behind.

“It’s not really worth it for me anymore. It’s a lot of time and money… I work like every day, and I have to constantly check my phone to see if I made a sale or to respond to people because that’s your reputation. It’s all on you.” He said. Devin has started to move away from using online platforms to conduct most of his business and prefers to set up shop at L.A.’s vintage pop-ups and flea markets.

We live in the age of Web 2.0, of “abundance” and “innovation”, but doesn’t it really just boil over to convenience? I can shop on Amazon, I can buy on Depop and maybe I will get some great stuff, conveniently, without ever getting out of bed. But I have a love for the little shops, the small fries in the world. There is something to be said about rack rolling and crate digging. It is an art. When you find that thing that your wardrobe so desperately needs, there is no greater feeling. 

Fuck you, Depop. I’ll keep my time, labor, and money in charity shops. 

Thank you, charity shops!