Shop till you Depop and pick up the cast-offs from the famous and stylish

Fancy snapping up the cast-offs of the famous and stylish? You’ll need a new app for that, says Phoebe Luckhurst
Bright spark: Lottie Moss, pictured with sister Kate, uses Depop to sell bras, jackets, dresses and skirts
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Anyone who has sold their clothes at a car-boot sale will know it is a demoralising, mercenary affair: your cast-offs are pawed over by avaricious traders and then, mostly, cast off for a second time. Dejected, you detour via a dump on the way home and ditch the tat — aware that you might as well have just thrown some twenties in there to begin with. Equally uninspiring is eBay: by the time you’ve taken grainy photos of your old stuff and negotiated the uploader tool, you’ve shed more tears than any sum of money could vindicate.

Cynics would argue the trick is to opt out of consumerism altogether — but that’s no fun. Wannabe traders disillusioned with past purchases should take their lead from mini-model Lottie Moss (Kate’s 16-year-old half-sister), who this week sold a selection of her cast-offs (including bras from La Senza and Primark) and a range of dresses, jackets and skirts using an app called Depop (depop.com) — an online marketplace that looks like a cross between Pinterest and Instagram.

Based, not surprisingly, in Shoreditch, the app (it’s free and available for both IoS and Android) is run by a team of 12. You create an account, take a picture of the item you want to sell and post it, with a caption giving a brief explanation of the item and the suggested price. Like on Instagram, you can follow accounts and interact with them, and chat privately to negotiate for the item. Sales are made through PayPal; there’s a discovery feature for tracking down desirable items and the site takes a fee of 10 per cent of the sale price.

The obvious appeal is the calibre of the items — and the model looks of those selling them. You won’t find middle-aged chaps offloading walking boots: a scroll through the Discovery board showcases bright young things selling graphic trainers (on my first browse I found Flyknits and limited-edition Liberty Vans), logo tees and Nineties miniskirts. The pictures look like high-end lookbooks — and in some cases, modelling portfolios — rather than amateur snaps captured in someone’s bedroom. If eBay is Middle England, Depop is Hackney. Indeed, Lottie Moss — a Calvin Klein model, and official one-to-watch — is proof of the site’s fashion credentials. It’s a community you want to be a part of.

“We wanted to create a selling site of the future,” says Depop CEO Runar Reistrup. “One that used social networks and mobile phones — and people, shops, brands and bloggers started picking it up. We’re still in the early days but the people who picked up early are exactly the sort who pick these things up early — young and fashionable.”

Indeed, brands are feeding off Depop’s effortless cool. “We found sales from Depop were higher than those from eBay or other selling platforms,” says Bryony Wilson, 22, a press officer at Girls Meets Dress, a marketplace for hiring designer dresses which has started using Depop to sell its out-of-season stock. “The image-focused layout and home feed allows users to easily sell anything, and the interface is similar to Instagram, providing a social interaction function that hasn’t previously been offered on selling sites.”

Wilson also uses the app for personal sales. “I found eBay too time-consuming. Depop is more of a community and the quality of items seems higher than on sites such as eBay. It’s easier to use than ASOS Marketplace, images are of better quality and buying an item is simpler.”

Indeed, Depop masters the immediacy of digital, clearly outclassing the messy, prehistoric interface of eBay particularly, crucially because it was designed as an app foremost rather than a website — yet another point in its favour. “People feel good when things are uncluttered, simple and beautiful,” Reistrup observes. “Mobile is such a small screen and people don’t have time. Selling shouldn’t take more than 30 seconds — if it does, you’re doing something wrong.”

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