Bored in Her Dorm Room, She Started Reselling Thrifted Clothes — Now It Brings in $10,300 a Month

Sophie Riegel was a bored Duke University freshman in 2020, stuck at home when Covid pushed her first year fully remote, when she started digging through her childhood bedroom for clothes and other items to sell online for extra cash. Those early sales added up to roughly $200, at about one item a week for the first couple months — enough to get her hooked on combing thrift stores around Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, buying $1 T-shirts and reselling them for up to $10, which within weeks had her moving about $50 a day in thrifted clothing.

By her first full year she'd hit roughly $70,000 in sales, built on hours spent studying other resellers on YouTube and learning which brands and platforms performed best. After graduating with a psychology degree, her side hustle brought in nearly $123,800 in sales in a single year — over $10,300 a month — across eBay, Mercari, and Poshmark, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It, and she'd banked more than $192,000 in total net profit since starting, after platform fees and cost of goods (a figure she says undercounts undocumented in-person sales).

Her edge comes from research: she studies which specific items and brands resell fastest or highest, like Lululemon leggings or Hoka sneakers, and has learned that once-premium brands hold resale value regardless of how cheaply she can thrift them — a J.Crew or Carhartt jacket costing her $10 to $20 in a thrift store might fetch $50 to $150 online. She also tracks her local thrift stores' restocking schedules to get first pick of new inventory rather than picking over the same picked-through racks. Her best find so far: a vintage Chanel purse bought for $2 that sold on eBay months later for $1,000.

She now sells around 10 items a day, averaging $400 to $500 in daily revenue, spending up to 25 hours a week on the business on top of her day job as a professional writer, speaker, and mental health coach — work that made the reselling income especially valuable early on, since building a client base for coaching and speaking takes time. The side hustle made up about 70% of her income in 2023, a share she expected to even out closer to 50-50 as her coaching and speaking work grew.

The unglamorous part is managing roughly 1,300 pieces of inventory at any given time — researching, photographing, editing photos, listing, and cataloging everything so she can locate it once it sells — work she'd consider eventually hiring help for, though not the actual thrifting itself. "Technically, the thrifting takes the most time," she says, "but it doesn't feel like work to me." She's since layered a third income stream on top, posting instructional reselling videos on YouTube and coaching other resellers directly, with no plans to slow down either career track.