How a mom earned $500,000 in three years selling clothes through an app called Poshmark

Three years ago, Evelyne Teman was sitting in her Los Angeles home at 2 in the morning playing computer solitaire, when an ad popped up for a clothing site called Poshmark. It promised to earn her cash for her used clothes.

Poshmark, founded in 2011, is like a cross between Pinterest and eBay for women's clothes. It connects buyers and sellers, handles the payments and logistics, taking a 20% cut.

When Teman saw that ad she thought, "Ok, I'll sign up for it. I listed one thing and it sold. That totally motivated me and I started emptying out my closet and everything sold and sold really fast, too," she tells Business Insider.

In less than three months, she had nothing left to sell and had made enough money to stock her online store with new clothes. The best part: running a virtual store didn't interfere with her job as a mom.

"I volunteer at school. I don't miss a field trip. I drive them. What I love the most, my business is in my hands on my phone. I can be in line at grocery market and sell something, or halfway around the world," she says.

Teman has become one of the most successful sellers on the site, and Poshmark says it has grown from about 30,000 members to over 1 million.

All told, she's sold some 10,000 items for more than $500,000, she lists about a 1,000 items and, as user "MiSSAISHA555," she has amassed a following of 520,000 people.

"Literally, my old clothes got me into the $500,000 business that I'm in and I didn't invest any money of my own to start," she says.

A leg up

To be fair, Teman had a leg up to be successful with Poshmark.

She's a Fashionista whose family is in the clothing business in Paris.

At the ripe age of 16, she opened her own clothing store. She loved it and worked there for about 12 years. But with the birth of her second son, she gave it up because she was overwhelmed by the demands of motherhood while running a retail shop. She now has four boys between the ages 9 and 22 (plus an adult stepson).

She had also been dabbling with online retail sales since she closed her store. She was selling stuff on eBay or Amazon.

But selling on eBay wasn't as lucrative or satisfying as her current business, she tells us, because Poshmark is also a social network. Through it, she's made some really good friends as well as some regular customers.

"I have customers I actually shop for, like a personal shopper and I'll tell them, I just got this in and I thought of you," she tells us.

How she did it

Although Teman is very experienced in the clothing business and that definitely helps her on Poshmark, she insists that anyone can learn to do online social selling. Here's how:

1. Work hard building your network of followers, not just on the site but in person. Teman held in-person meet-ups to encourage friends to join Poshmark and so Poshmark users could get to know each other.

"I did everything I could do. I started the meet and greets, where people in L.A. on Poshmark could meet each other, so everyone in our community would know each other. That's how I met some of my best friends," she says.

2. Share other people's items to your followers and they'll share yours back. "Another beautiful thing, it's a huge community. Women empower women and everyone helps. Someone shares my listing and all their followers see my listing. I share their listing to my followers," she says.

3. Use great photos and descriptions. People want to see the clothes modeled on a real person, not on a hanger. Evelyne will model an item herself if she has to.

4. If you're going to sell new items, get a wholesale license from your city/state, know and follow the license rules. Poshmark is trying to help sellers in this area. Last week, it launched a new wholesale service that allows its sellers to buy stock from about a dozen brands.

6. Start with a small, but not tiny, closet, with about 25-30 items, enough to show the variety of what your shop is.

7. Attend any events the site puts on for its users. Teman went to all of Poshmark's events, for instance, and they started featuring her on the site, which attracted followers and grew her network.