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For Maria Jones, secondhand clothing has long been a way of life.
“I’ve always loved going to the thrift store,” says the 32-year-old. Her mom would take her as a kid because they were “a way to find affordable, quality items.” That love of thrifting would ultimately translate into a business.
In October 2017, Jones’ sister convinced her to start a store on online marketplace Poshmark. Initially, Jones sold the items from her own closet. Eventually, however, she expanded to items she found at used clothing stores or ordered in bulk and resold.
These days, her store, The Lemon Theory, features more than 1,700 listings. She’s grossed more than $300,000 on the site altogether.
Here’s how Jones, who’s married with two daughters and lives in Garden Valley, California, built her online thrifting hustle.
‘The first thing I sold was my own personal H&M shirt’
Jones studied math at the University of California, Berkeley, between 2013 and 2016. She left a semester before graduating after running out of financial aid and ended up working at airplane maintenance company Pauli Systems, first as an assistant to the vice president and eventually as a sales manager.
After her sister suggested she open a Poshmark store, Jones quickly discovered how easy it was to make money on it. “The first thing I sold was my own personal H&M shirt,” she says, adding that, “I sold it for $8, my earnings on it was $5.”
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She realized, “it took me a couple minutes to list, so why not try to go buy stuff to sell?”
Jones had about $25,000 worth of student loans to pay off. She decided to dedicate her Poshmark earnings to doing so, working on the store after she’d get home from work at Pauli Systems.
By the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, she was debt free.
‘I’d be feeding my baby and sharing my closet’
Jones had originally planned to start having kids at 30. Just before the pandemic hit, however, at 28 and having worked on Poshmark for years, she realized the store offered an opportunity to start her family a little early. It was flexible, she was making solid money and she could scale it even further.
With her commute time cut during the pandemic, she began ramping up her efforts by buying and listing more inventory, and left Pauli Systems when her daughter was born in December 2020. She never stopped putting time into her store. “I’d be feeding my baby and sharing my closet,” she says.
Among her tactics for scaling was buying pallets of clothing with hundreds of pieces each from sites like Helpsy, which sells items from brand names like Tommy Hilfiger and Madewell, for example, in bulk.
These can be anything “from shirts that got makeup stains when people tried them on in stores, to people returning them so they’re literally brand new, or you sometimes also get the shirts that have been worn and then returned,” she says. She washes everything and sells them secondhand.
On average, an item from each box can be about $8, she says, “but you can sell it for $40.”
‘My husband’s joke is that he wants to quit his job to join me’
These days, Jones says she works about three to four hours per day, often around her daughters’ schedule. “My youngest naps only in the car,” she says, “so we have to go for a drive for every nap. But it’s not a big deal because I have to drive out to the post office” to make deliveries anyway.
Between April 2023 and March 2024, she grossed about $45,000 from the site.
Among her bestsellers: plus-sized bras. “Those are harder to find as secondhand,” she says. She’ll buy them for about $6 “and you can sell them for about $20 to $30 quickly.” She hopes to try out some more high-end, designer items in the future, but they take a bit more effort and research to figure out.
If you buy a designer item secondhand for $200 and sell it for $400, “you make $150 on it,” she says. “But then you’re also sitting on a $200 item if it doesn’t sell quickly.”
In the meantime, she’s happy to keep working at the pace she’s built up. “My husband’s joke is that he wants to quit his job to join me,” she says.
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