What went wrong with Depop

I remember the first items I bought on Depop. It was back in 2017, actually before I had developed an interest in sustainability. I had just dropped out of university and was working part-time at a local pub. It wasn’t a great time in my life to say the least.

It became a bit of an outlet. For a shopaholic like me, branded items being sold for a fraction of their original price was a no-brainer, and was pivotal in getting me over my aversion to second-hand clothing.

I would see items in shops and think to myself “I’ll just wait six months and buy it for cheap on Depop”. It’s how I got my Topshop Hurricane snake print boots. It saved my hide when I bought some ASOS shoes in the wrong size and then they ran out of the right size, only to stumble across them later on the app.

I didn’t just use it to purchase high street items; Depop was the first time I dipped my toes into the waters of vintage clothing and I found some real bargains on there (although the stench of stale cigarette smoke on the floral maxi skirt I ordered still remains in my nostrils to this day). I found a genuine leather white mini skirt and a Burberry trench (although perhaps that should be third-hand as the seller had purchased it from a vintage clothing store).

I personally never sold on Depop, as I found it was only really the sellers who committed to selling their items (and usually keeping a steady flow of new stock) or those whose items adhered to a tightly curated aesthetic. The layout of Depop is very similar to that of Instagram, and having items in the same style, colour or brand is pleasing to the eye and increases the likelihood of shoppers following the seller (and thus receiving notifications of new items to sell). This approach was much more successful than the sellers with eclectic mix that honestly represented the cast-offs of their wardrobe. Many of the items I bought were a casual seller’s first ever sale, despite usually having around a dozen on offer.

This was not a problem in the beginning- at least not from a shopper’s perspective anyway. But it was a sign of troubles to come.

Those who realised there was money to be made by reselling second-hand items sourced from charity shops (not an inherently wrong thing in my opinion, but a somewhat controversial in sustainability circles online due to the allegation that this denies low-cost clothing to those in a local community who most need it) went into overdrive, hiking up their prices.

The magic word was ‘y2k’, a banner under which anything could be sold for £20 and above, creeping close to the original RRP or sometimes surpassing it!

The app became increasingly challenging to navigate. For maximum visibility sellers would list just a blurb of tags regardless of whether they were relevant; a Topshop skirt manufactured and sold in 2013 could simultaneously be tagged ’90s’ and ’00s’ when the skirt itself frankly bore no resemblance to the clothing of either decade. Brand names would just be used for the sake of increasing their chances of appearing in search results. The rise of even faster fashion brands in the late 2010s became increasingly omnipresent, lowering the overall quality of the items on sale.

So when Vinted launched in the UK, I immediately signed up. At the initial stage the app was pretty glitchy; it would only show a few dozen items and then was unable to download more and at one point was entirely in French. But it soon came to find its footing and since then has firmly established itself amongst young people in the UK. I erroneously assumed that Vinted was a relatively new company, but actually it was founded in Lithuania in 2008 and has since expanded into over a dozen other countries.

It would be fantasy to pretend that Vinted is a shining city on the hill- Shein and its ilk are arguably just as prevalent as they are on Depop (with the small caveat that sellers aren’t charging nearly as much) but its search engine and filters are much better than Depop’s. The layout of the website and the range of items sold bear more resemblance to the early days of eBay (before it became an Amazon copycat dominated by mass-produced new items sold by large companies). I also suspect it will follow a similar trajectory to Depop, starting out as a cheap, sustainable and user-friendly platform that is ultimately undone by its popularity, with sellers asking for unreasonable items for low-quality products leading to a migration to whatever new reselling platform senses an opportunity. But for now, I enjoy Vinted as much as I once did Depop (and perhaps more than is good for my bank account).