• 

Imagine you’re a fashionable, environmentally conscious young professional, hired into your first job. Your company sends you to, say, Dubuque, Iowa—a great town, but not known for its fashionable offerings. You can visit your favorite brands online of course, but you’re also facing new budget constraints: rent to pay, student loans to start paying back, and someday maybe you’d like to buy a house or have some children. Does it mean that you can no longer claim “fashionable” as an adjective to describe yourself?

Of course not, because in today’s economy, savvy consumers, highly similar to yourself, have found ways to leverage social media to create novel retail channels, dedicated to giving you exactly the products you want, at a price you can afford, in a convenient place, and in a way that enables you to feel good about how you’re contributing, or not, to global supply issues. In various buy–sell–trade communities, other socially conscious fashion fans on a budget post their lightly used items and ship them around the world. Some of the groups are dedicated to a particular brand, whereas others host a range of appealing options with various labels, but in many cases, they avoid mass market or fast fashion items. Rather, they purposefully embrace and offer independent, slow fashion brands, shared with like-minded consumers and virtual friends. 

On Noishaf Bazaar (read the name backwards), the approximately 30,000 members submit items they no longer want, and the founder (along with three employees) reviews them for appeal and appropriateness. The site hosts around 1,500 products at a time, with several hundred new submissions arriving each day. To handle this substantial volume, Noishaf charges about $4 per transaction, but it also facilitates interactions in which people clear their closets, and others obtain items at about half of what they would have cost originally.

Other communities are smaller or more specific, such as those dedicated to the Elizabeth Suzann fashion label. The members tag one another on posts that they think others might like, such as suggesting a pair of shoes, being sold by another participant, in the online friend’s size. When the Elizabeth Suzann hosted a sample sale in Nashville, many group members used the event as an excuse to make a road trip and meet the people with whom they had been shopping, trading, and exchanging clothing for months.

Whether small or large, the communities become, for many of their members, a regular, even daily form of interaction. Even if they are not buying specifically, they can visit the site to see what’s available, who is ready to give up an item she purchased last year, and who might be looking for something different. On a site dedicated to the Ace & Jig clothing brand, the entire community is tracking the journey of a single “traveling” shirt, which members agree keep for a day or two, post a picture of themselves wearing, and then send on to the next member.

They also offer support and encouragement, praising fellow members for how they have styled themselves in pictures that they post, modeling their latest purchase. Some platforms and brands are specifically dedicated to plus-size offerings, providing an alternative to the limited size ranges available in stores. And the participants reaffirm their own and the brands’ values, by reiterating their dedication to a sharing, rather than a pure consumption, economy.

Discussion Questions:

1. What are social media trading groups?
2. How are these groups changing the ways consumers interact with brands?
3. What are the advantages and disadvantages of these groups, from a retailer’s perspective?
4. What can retailers do to increase the benefits they might earn from these groups?

Source: Breena Kerr, The New York Times, January 2, 2020