I own a reselling business with my wife, and our sales are booming thanks to tariffs. I can't attribute this growth to anything else.
Ryan Frankel and his wife, Evelyn, launched Thrift Vintage Fashion in 2020.
The business supplies secondhand clothing nationwide.
Thrift Vintage Fashion saw a 41% revenue increase after tariffs were announced.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Ryan Frankel, a 36-year-old business owner in Miami. It has been edited for length and clarity.
My primary business is Thrift Vintage Fashion, which I launched in 2020 with my wife, Evelyn. We supply secondhand clothing — mostly men's wear, such as T-shirts, sweatshirts, and denim — to stores nationwide. When Trump took office in January, our sales took a steep decline.
Once he came into office, there was a lot of uncertainty. However, we noticed a significant incline once tariffs were announced in February. From February to March, we saw an unprecedented 41% increase in revenue (gross sales). Then we had our best March and April since we started the business.
I can't attribute our growth to anything other than the tariffs.
My grandfather began selling men's secondhand clothing after World War II. In the 90s, my father primarily sold denim and Levi's. When I started working with my father in 2010, we brought the business online and got our name out there.
After I launched Thrift Vintage Fashion, which is primarily a wholesale B2B business, it popped off right away. We did over $1 million in revenue in our first year working out of our garage during peak COVID in 2020. This was mainly due to my experience working with my father over the previous decade and improving the model and ordering efficiency through the TVF website.
Many clients — primarily secondhand clothing stores (big and small), vintage clothing stores, and online resellers — reached out to ask if the tariffs had affected our business. There was a lot of uncertainty, but we were able to confidently say, "No, we're not affected, and we're not going to raise our prices." Since then, we've just seen a slew of new orders come in, in addition to existing clients ordering a lot more.
Consumers preparing for prices to go up is another factor that has increased our secondhand sales. Everyone's talking about how fashion prices are going up, but since secondhand circulates within the US, no tariffs are affecting it at all.
People are potentially looking into reselling more, which is positively affecting my wholesale business. We've seen steady growth across the US.
The US has been our primary market for the last three years, and we see increasing interest from new and existing resale clients. Our numbers are growing, our existing customers are doubling down on their business, and there's increasing demand in the secondhand market. I'm biased, as this is my career, but it's an excellent opportunity for shoppers and business owners to consider selling and buying secondhand goods.
There's so much of it out there: eBay, estate sales, garage sales, or storage units. A lot of secondhand merchandise is way better quality than most things produced today, and there's a growing demand for all of it. We're buying more goods and building our supply chain, prepping for growth in both wholesale and retail sectors.
Believe it or not, many used clothing articles cost more than many new clothing items made today. So, our company is always up against the perception of selling something used for the same price or more than new clothing. However, this perception is shifting daily, with people recognizing the value of secondhand versus cheap new fashion.
Every day, we're shedding the old stigma of secondhand shops being viewed as "less than." The fact is that the items we sell are in excellent condition. While many brands produce cheap, throwaway fast fashion, older clothes were often made more durably. Whether the clothes were made five or 15 years ago, many desirable styles have become rare by nature and hard to find, thus increasing their value.
If you're already selling secondhand items, that's great; stick with it. You're probably seeing increases already, and I think it will continue. If you're not selling secondhand, especially if you're worried about tariffs, I would consider trying to implement it into your existing business.
There are so many significant factors in buying secondhand that the average American consumer slowly recognizes more each day. There are also opportunities to grow a brand reselling the billions of secondhand garments in circulation. I believe we're past the days of "thrifting" carrying a negative connotation. We're scratching the surface of what's possible with secondhand.
If you're a small-business owner with a unique story that you would like to share, please email the editor, Manseen Logan, at mlogan@businessinsider.com.
Read the original article on Business Insider
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Forbes
30 minutes ago
- Forbes
SMBs Go Global: 3 Ways Bank Partnerships Can Transform The Small Business Payments Experience
By Jeff Koyen America's small and medium-sized businesses ('SMBs') employ almost half (46%) of the U.S. workforce, about 59 million people,[1] and account for 43.5% of the country's GDP.[2] They're also firmly on the rebound as quarterly small business employment growth returns to pre-Covid levels.[3] Meanwhile, SMBs are becoming more globalized and connected around the world. According to PCMI market research commissioned by Visa, nearly one-third of American SMBs make cross-border payments—international transactions that often help them manage suppliers, customers and operations.[4] getty Yet some major financial institutions fail to meet these clients' needs—especially when it comes to fast, efficient and cost-effective cross-border payments. Forzley co-founded VEEM (which stands for 'Very Easy Exchange of Money') to solve these problems. In 2022, the San Francisco-based payments platform joined a number of other digital financial services platforms that are partnering with Visa Direct to remove friction from global payments. So how can financial technology (fintech) innovators like VEEM close the gap between global payment expectations and real-world experiences? And how can that, in turn, help banks deliver new solutions for small businesses? Below, explore three ways financial institutions can use emerging fintech to create a better banking experience for their SMB customers. As every entrepreneur and executive knows, your business is only as strong as its balance sheet. For SMBs that rely on overseas suppliers and customers, managing cash flow can be a huge challenge. Due to the limitations of traditional banking, the process of getting paid and paying suppliers can take several days, even weeks. That's not a problem for Fintechs, like VEEM, that connect to the Visa Direct network. Without Visa Direct, payment platforms often rely on existing global banking infrastructure, such as SWIFT and correspondent banking, which do not meet the demands of most modern SMBs. Settling payments on traditional networks can take days. Visa, meanwhile, provides day-after settlement, which allows clients and partners, and their SMB customers, to send funds more quickly to payees and beneficiaries. Visa Direct also brings greater transparency to global payment processes, which was the case for VEEM. With Visa Direct, SMB customers can instead know exactly where their money is—helping them make more informed decisions. Visa Direct helps financial institutions to solidify account primacy by embedding real-time cross-border capabilities that keep SMBs transacting within their ecosystem—reducing outflows to other providers, improving future cross-sell opportunities. The digital economy may be global, but currency exchange rates remind us that borders still exist. When sending and receiving payments, SMBs can find themselves at the mercy of exchange rates. Imagine sending $1,000 to an overseas supplier on Monday morning, only to learn it's worth $950 when the payment finally clears. Real-time payments help solve this problem by reducing the settlement lifecycle. Visa Direct also offers its banking clients another tool: multi-currency accounts. Traditional banking institutions, on the other hand, convert foreign currencies according to their own schedule. Clients have no control or visibility into the process, potentially leaving a lot of money on the exchange rate table. For SMBs that regularly transact with the same overseas customers and suppliers, converting between currencies may not even be necessary. Using multi-currency accounts, they can hold funds in foreign currency and use these accounts to conduct their back-and-forth business. While foreign exchange fluctuations are unavoidable, these types of tools allow SMBs to have more control and visibility. Visa Direct enables financial institutions to offer multi-currency solutions that increase deposits and generate new revenue streams while giving SMBs more flexibility and control—all within the bank's branded environment. All too often, small and medium-sized organizations can feel ignored when their banks scale up to go after bigger enterprises. SMBs working across borders may feel this even more keenly with, for example, new fee schedules that benefit higher-volume clients. In Meszaros' view, ignoring those SMB pain points is a mistake. The issue may be one of perception: Modern small businesses extend far beyond the local grocery stores or mom-and-pop pharmacies that were once unlikely to expand beyond regional markets. Today's SMBs are comprised of startups, innovators, eager entrepreneurs and others seeking opportunities for growth. When banks stop paying attention to the changing SMB landscape, they may—inadvertently or not—remove the features, functions and favorable fees that help SMBs compete in global markets. When financial institutions overlook these evolving needs, they risk ceding ground to more agile fintechs that are actively courting SMBs with tailored, tech-forward offerings. The result? A gradual erosion of wallet share, weakened brand loyalty and a missed opportunity to grow long-term, high-value relationships with the next generation of business customers. Financial institutions that ignore small business needs may also find that their SMB customers start looking for other providers to fulfill them. In the case of VEEM, Forzley embraces the SMB market as an enormous opportunity. His company's partnership with Visa Direct, he adds, 'has been instrumental in making our vision a reality.' By leveraging Visa Direct, financial institutions can differentiate in a competitive market by launching SMB-first solutions that deepen engagement, build loyalty and position themselves as an innovation partner. *Actual funds availability depends on receiving financial institution and region. [1] U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 'Small businesses contributed 55 percent of the total net job creation from 2013 to 2023', May 2024. [2] U.S. Small Business Administration, 'Frequently Asked Questions About Small Business, 2024', July 2024. [3] U.S. Small Business Administration, 'Economic Bulletin, Fourth Quarter 2024', January 2025. [4] Visa PCMI Payments & Commerce Market Intelligence, 'SMB Payments–Visa Direct Market Fit Analysis', July 2024.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Opinion - What globalists get wrong about free trade
Since at least the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, major media outlets have decried the impending end of globalization. These lamentations have only accelerated since the Trump administration declared April 2 'Liberation Day,' with our trading counterparties' unfair practices to be summarily addressed through increased and partially reciprocal duties (along with a minimum tariff level). To hear the media tell it, such tariffs are the death knell for a beneficial global trading order and will immiserate billions. But such valedictories for the end of globalization advance a straw-man fiction about what is now supposedly lost: namely, that President Trump's policies contravene an agreed framework whereby goods, capital and labor move across national boundaries in a mostly unencumbered manner. If one believes in the merits of free trade and cross-border capital flows, it is essential not to confuse the ideal with the real. In truth, there have always been (often significant) friction and costs associated with such movements. Today's so-called free trade regime recalls Western support for Soviet communism, snarling 'real communism has never been tried' in defense of its myriad failures. Love it or hate it, what exists today is hardly real free trade. If what we have today isn't it, what does free trade closer to its Platonic ideal look like? This notion, that trade conditions are rarely wholly free or unfree, also confuses the media. The reality is that trading conditions sit uneasily along a continuum, and relatively free trade only occurs under certain conditions. These include (among others): Mutually agreed-upon rules for international commerce, consistently applied or at least generally observed, allowing for relatively open and reciprocal market access; Exemptions for strategic industries, a form of insurance for nations, insulating them from being caught short in a subsequent conflict with trading partners; Reliable cross-border supply chains, allowing for the disaggregation of production into its constituent parts (trading resource control for cost efficiency) and An ideologically unipolar historical moment, or a multi-polar world in which international trade largely occurs within the poles. These and other trade-friendly conditions were largely obtained in the decades leading up to the First World War, and in the 20 or so years following the end of the Cold War. While a world war is an obvious culprit ending an earlier era of globalization, what explains its current travails? A rules-based trading order can withstand certain restrictions (tariffs, regulations, quotas) — in fact, protecting strategic sectors demands some of them. But excessive use, along with outright cheating — subsidies, intellectual property theft and currency manipulation, as in the case of China — gives rise to a prisoner's dilemma with suboptimal outcomes. Similarly, the extended supply chains that proliferated over the last 30 years assumed the only national interest that mattered was economic advancement. Consider the terms made fashionable over the last three decades: 'a borderless world,' 'global citizens,' 'the end of history' and 'soft power.' The disaggregation of business models previously housed under a single corporate roof never anticipated revisionist challenges to Pax Americana, such as the retrograde gunboat diplomacy of China's Belt and Road Initiative, much less the rise of transnational terrorist organizations disrupting commerce and producing failed states. Moreover, the unipolar moment has ended. As China, under the rule of the Communist Party, displaced the Soviet Union as our primary geopolitical adversary, its admission to the World Trade Organization in 2001 conferred upon it a degree of economic leverage over the United States that Joseph Stalin could only have dreamed of. The return of history, with not only China but Russia, Turkey and others asserting spheres of influence and advancing parochial interests while embedded within a global economic system and multilateral institutions, further vitiates unfettered trade and capital movements. Failing to understand that globalization — the mutually beneficial interdependence and integration among nations, entailing a largely unrestricted flow of goods, capital, information and people — only flourishes under certain conditions, is only half of what the media and establishment elites get wrong. The other is the fetishization of globalism as an ideology. One can support globalization without being a globalist. Free trade and capital flows do not themselves comprise a belief system, but are rather a means to an end: actualizing individuals' aspirations and the nations that represent them. Free trade is the handmaiden of liberty, not vice versa. Reifying trade at the expense of other liberal values risks perverse outcomes; offshoring a nation's pharmaceutical production capacity to potentially belligerent nations is but one example. Another danger in globalism as an ideology is that of falling prey to historical determinism. Seeing deepening global integration as inevitable presents several risks. Believing it impervious threatens underinvestment in its sustenance (see the collapse of the WTO's Doha Round); competing objectives such as national self-determination and defense of borders may also be subordinated to globalism's tenets, destabilizing the very nations seeking to benefit from globalization. The proposed Trump tariff regime is not the full-throated attack on a functioning trading order critics make it out to be. To acknowledge this is not to defend blindly the administration's policies. Tariffs have their place as leverage against trading counterparties with onerous trade restrictions of their own. They are also useful to support strategic sectors in an increasingly dangerous world. What tariffs won't do is revive a rust-belt economy, which isn't coming back. Comparative advantage, alas, remains undefeated. Nor should tariffs be sold to the public as a governmental revenue-generator while incumbent income, sales and other tax regimes remain firmly in place. Globalization improves lives and should be promoted. Free trade and capital movements have consistently shown themselves, when the requisite conditions are present, to be mutually beneficial. How these benefits are distributed and whether the unchecked movement of people across borders is similarly beneficial are more complex matters. But the promotion of globalism as an inviolate creed, either for its own sake or as a counterpoint to 'America First' policies, fails to appreciate that globalization cannot be summoned by magical thinking and that it is the servant of liberty, not its master. Richard J. Shinder is the founder and managing partner of Theatine Partners, a financial consultancy. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
New York Times
an hour ago
- New York Times
Eagles fan Mike Trout wrote Super Bowl LIX score on his bat knob — now it's in a baseball card
NFL fans commemorate their team's Super Bowl victories in all sorts of ways, but Mike Trout might be the first to do it on a bat knob. The South Jersey native who is often seen in his end-zone seats at Lincoln Financial Field through the fall and winter wrote a special inscription on the bottom of one of his game-used bats after his Philadelphia Eagles won Super Bowl LIX: 'Eagles 40 Chiefs 22. Fly Eagles Fly!' That knob has since been cut off the bat and put into a one-of-a-kind baseball card autographed by Trout that will be in Topps' upcoming Tier One set (release date has yet to be announced). FIRST LOOK: Mike Trout wrote the final score on his game-used bat knob 🦅🔥 — Topps (@Topps) June 1, 2025 Bat knob cards always present a rare piece of unique MLB memorabilia, but Trout, himself a baseball card collector, now has one of the more unique ones out there, with MLB-NFL crossover appeal. It's far from the first time the Los Angeles Angels outfielder referenced his Eagles fandom on a card, though. He wrote 'Go Birds!' on his one-of-one autographed MLB logo patch card in 2023 Topps Triple Threads and 'Fly Eagles Fly!' on his 2023 Topps Pristine 1/1 card. But if you're looking for crossover appeal for sports card and trading card game collectors, the recently retired Evan Longoria helped create what could become the most expensive bat knob card in industry history. An autographed bat knob card in this year's Tier One set for the three time All-Star third baseman contains a knob with an image of Charizard from Pokemon fame. When Pokémon and baseball collide 🤝 Evan Longoria posted this on his Instagram, a 1 of 1 bat knob featuring Charizard that will be in Tier One Baseball 👀🔥 — Fanatics Live (@fanaticslive) March 23, 2025 There's already a $100,000 public bounty on the Longoria card made by a Florida sports card shop owner. That would shatter the record for the most expensive bat knob card sold. According to Card Ladder, a 2017 Topps Tier One Honus Wagner card (not autographed) stands as the top selling bat knob card going for $24,600 in August 2022. Advertisement Longoria made it no secret that he'd been an interested buyer of the card as well. However, nothing can compare to Bryce Harper's 'RIP Harambe' bat knob card. Bryce Harper's 1/1 game-used "RIP Harambe" bat knob card… 🦍🔥 — Topps (@Topps) February 19, 2025 Milwaukee Brewers outfielder Christian Yelich and Tampa Bay Rays shortstop Junior Caminero added their own twists to their upcoming Tier One bat knob autographed cards. They each have images of their 2024 Topps Series One cards on the knobs. While collectors wait for Tier One's release, they can also hunt for bat knob cards in the new Topps Sterling set, which went on sale Wednesday. The set bears 81 autographed bat knob cards from a mix of current players like Trout, Mookie Betts, Aaron Judge and Juan Soto as well as former players like Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, David Ortiz and Cal Ripken Jr. They keep getting better… This stack of game-used bat knob cards will be featured in 2025 Sterling. Arriving SOON 🗓️ — Topps (@Topps) May 10, 2025 The Athletic maintains full editorial independence in all our coverage. When you click or make purchases through our links, we may earn a commission.
