- Lindsay Esbjerg is a full-time shoe reseller on Poshmark with her husband, Ryan.
- They love working on their own schedule and have sold $775,000 worth of shoes since 2017.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Lindsay Esbjerg, a 32-year-old Poshmark reseller in Portland, Maine. It has been edited for length and clarity.
I resell shoes on Poshmark full time under the closet name "RNZY," which is my husband, Ryan's, and my name combined. We currently have more than 150,000 followers on the platform, 2,200 active listings, and we average 500 sales a month on Poshmark. We make a profit of six figures a year and have made almost 19,000 total sales.
From 2013 to 2015, I worked as a Bath & Body Works store manager in Burlington, Vermont. After moving to Maine in 2015, I began managing sales and marketing for a small family-run business repurposing used sails into handbags.
In June 2017, I parted ways with the family business and began my reselling journey with Ryan. I'd sold a few household items at the time, but nothing significant. I was looking for a way to make money on my own schedule. Ryan left his job at the Marriott in Portland to take this on with me full time.
We spent the first few months selling anything we could find in our house on Facebook Marketplace
We sold clothes, shoes, coffee makers, candles, and more, hand-delivering goods within 50 miles of Portland.
In September 2017, we started selling on Poshmark. We'd seen people on Instagram using it and thought it would be a great marketplace to try. We sold shoes and clothing, but we quickly niched down to exclusively shoes. We both realized that we enjoyed the entire process of selling shoes — sourcing, cleaning, photographing, listing, and shipping. All the other items we sold were profitable, but we just didn't enjoy the process as much.
We find shoes to sell in thrift stores like Goodwill, Savers, Salvation Army, and Plato's Closet all around New England. Ninety percent of the shoes we sell are gently used, but occasionally we do find some unworn pairs at thrift stores.
Poshmark is easy to set up and easy to use, and within a couple of months it became our No. 1 grossing platform. In 2021, we made $218,000 in sales on Poshmark. Our total sales since we started are more than $775,000. Poshmark does take a fee of $2.95 for sales under $15 and 20% of sales over $15. Facebook Marketplace also takes a 5% fee. On average, we make four times the money we spent on each pair after fees and shipping costs.
In the beginning, we were making enough to pay our bills and slowly grow
We set aside the money we needed for bills and reinvested everything else. This allowed us to grow quickly while also covering all our expenses. When starting out, one of the biggest challenges was budgeting how much to spend on inventory and how much to save for living expenses.
Ryan and I quickly found which parts of the business we each excelled at. We both travel around New England purchasing shoes at thrift stores, but Ryan primarily handles the cleaning and photography while I do the listing and accounting. We both package and ship the shoes together every morning, and we work out of our home in our basement and garage.
We now have four employees who clean the shoes and photograph them. We hired our first employee three years ago. None of our employees work for us full time — they all work on their own schedule a few days a week.
We share other users' listings occasionally, but we don't join Posh Parties. We don't do any extra marketing besides sharing our own listings and sourcing shoes that people want. One aspect of Poshmark we wish we could improve is having to share all our listings to the feed every single day to get more eyes on them.
I enjoy the tools Poshmark offers, like bundling items together so the buyer can save on shipping costs. Another tool I like is that buyers can "like" pairs of shoes by pushing a button on the listing, which lets me know to send a discounted offer to the buyers who have chosen to "like" each pair. We do this weekly.
We began reselling as a way to have more time and freedom
We didn't want to have to ask someone for time off or have anyone else scheduling our days. We work when we want to work.
On an average day, we wake up, take care of our daughter, and walk the dog. Then we both package orders from the previous night. I'll get some pairs listed while Ryan prepares shoes to drop off to our employees, who clean and photograph them.
We then go for a longer walk around a local bike path. This is the type of activity that makes us love reselling. We can get up from whatever we're doing during the day and get outside. In the afternoons, Ryan and I do a dropoff and pickup with our employees and our workday typically wraps up by 4 p.m.
Here's my best advice for selling on the platform
One piece of advice I'd offer to a new Posher is to really focus on the quality of your listing. Make sure to take well-lit photos of items, write thorough descriptions, and use market-value pricing. We look up what the shoes have sold for previously on Poshmark. (We search for the pair of shoes on Poshmark and select "sold items." Then we can see what the recent sale prices were.) The price we list has nothing to do with retail. Some pairs get listed over retail, some under — it's all about what the value for that specific pair is, which is easy to figure out by looking at previous sales.
It's important to use a photo of yourself on your Poshmark profile. You want to build trust with buyers so they know exactly who they're purchasing from. We get positive reviews by being honest with our listings, carefully packaging each pair, and shipping rapidly. I personally love using Poshmark for the seller protection they offer and the transparency with the selling fees. If there are any issues with the shipping, like packages getting lost, Poshmark handles the cost so neither the buyer nor the seller is penalized. Poshmark also ensures that buyers can't return items for issues that are out of the seller's control, like shoes not fitting the buyer.
Keep track of everything so you know what's working and what isn't within your business. When Poshmark introduced the "Closet Insights" tool, which provides a comprehensive breakdown of sales and inventory data, it made this much easier. We've been using Google Sheets since day one, and we log every pair of shoes in it, including brand, size, style, color, and buy cost. Additionally, we use Quickbooks to track mileage, our expenses, and our income.
Last, but not least, set aside money for taxes as the year goes on so your business doesn't get shocked when tax season rolls around. Self-employment tax is typically between 15% and 20%.
Are you a successful Poshmark reseller and want to share your story? Email Lauryn Haas at lhaas@insider.com.