Studio Practice: Branding a Depop Seller: Research

Depop - The creative community's mobile marketplace

The company's branding

Depop is where the world's creatives come to buy, sell and discover the most inspiring and unique things.

Depop is a peer-to-peer social shopping app based in London, with additional offices in Milan and New York City.

(Article 1)

'Everyone I know buys vintage': the Depop sellers shaking up fashion

The Guardian

by Sarah Butler

The fast-growing social media app combines Instagram-style image creation with digital market bargaining. Caitlin Young is one of millions of teenagers and 20-somethings who are shaking up the fashion industry by digging out their parents’ cast-offs, raiding charity shops and scanning boot sales to build mini businesses online.

Young picks up 1990s and “Y2K” early 2000s “vintage” gear from charity shops and jumble sales and then styles or customises them for her 22,500 followers on Depop, a fast-growing social media app which combines the image creation of Instagram with a digital version of market trader bargaining.

“People in my family say, ‘You sell used shoes?,’ like they are so disgusted, but everyone I know buys vintage. It’s what people do now,” says Young. “It pays for my life,” adds the animation student, who sells up to £2,000-worth of secondhand clothing a month online.

Young and other online clothing sellers are shrugging off the trends shovelled out by mainstream brands and high street chains and making thousands of pounds by trading vintage trainers, fluorescent hoodies and high-waisted jeans their parents wore to raves in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Founded in 2011, Depop now has 10m users, most of whom are in the UK, and takes more than £300m ($400m) a year in sales, a figure that has doubled year on year. Its British shoppers, 80% of whom are aged 13 to 24, buy an average of 20,000 items a day. It reckons that hundreds of its top sellers make more than £150,000 a year selling online.

Depop has caught on to a trend in which secondhand is no longer second best, trading in a more social way than the more established eBay and Gumtree. The online fashion specialist Asos’s marketplace section includes vintage boutiques, while British startup Student High Street holds sellers’ events at universities.

A study in the US by Thredup suggested there was a 25% rise in the number of women prepared to buy secondhand in 2017 compared with the year before. It predicted 15% annual growth in the market over the next few years. compared with just 2% for the overall fashion sales.

Thredup estimates that secondhand clothes now make up 6% of respondents’ wardrobes, double that of 10 years ago, and that proportion could almost double again to 11% by 2027. “It’s almost a dark market,” says Lorna Hall, the head of insight at the trend forecasting firm WGSN. “Money is coming out of the mainstream market because of this way of shopping, particularly in Generation Z [under 25s].”

“People love that you can easily search for people selling on Depop who are close to you, pick up your purchase and avoid postage costs,” she says.

Beckerman told Artefact magazine his initial goal was to aim for “young designers and cool collectors … but we discovered this world of girls who want to sell their whole wardrobe and I didn’t imagine there would be such a need for that. Ebay is complicated, long and, if you want to sell something for £5, it just doesn’t work. So having Depop as a social marketplace with chat is better and all the girls love it”.

CONTEXT:

The 2008 recession sparked a change in attitude that has been embraced by young people who want to be fashionable but are concerned about the environmental impact of throwing away clothes after only a few wears.

“We are living in an age of DIY and the rise of being able to create your own platform,” says Depop seller Thidarat Kaha, who sells about £6,000 of clothes a month to her 44,000 followers. “The mainstream market used to be just buying something from Topshop, and someone else would have that same dress.

“The magic of this product is it is usually one on one. No one else is going to get anything else exactly the same as what you just purchased. And young people are more conscious about the future of the planet. Recycling and buying vintage clothing is contributing to to consuming clothes in a better way.”

Depop is aiming to tap into that change in mentality to quadruple the size of the business in the next three or four years. In total, $40m has now been ploughed into the company by investors betting on that future, including Octopus Ventures, the company that backed Graze and Gym Box and Creandum, that backed Spotify and the payment tech firm iZettle.

“We are so small compared to the overall size of the market, the potential is huge,” says Maria Raga, Depop’s chief executive. “Depop is about people selling stuff that is good quality, inspirational and that is down to a lot of creativity.”

Young, who began by making and selling clothes to friends at school and used to sell vintage items on eBay before joining Depop as a student, says she has had such a good response to her customised clothes that she is now considering launching her own clothing brand. “I started it to keep me going while I’m studying, but I just love it,” she says.

(Article 2)

How Depop went from niche app to making secondhand clothing cool

Fashion is cyclical. Younger generations are embracing vintage fashion and environmentally friendly clothes - in a new way

By SANJANA VARGHESE

Selling stuff online isn’t new. But for teens and young people, eBay, Gumtree and Craigslist are outdated.

Instead, Generation Instagram has discovered Depop – half social network, half shopping platform, which lets users upload pictures of stuff they own, to sell directly to others. Depop now has 11 million users – three quarters of them are under 25. And if you’ve got a popular store or are featured on the explore page that’s curated by Depop staff, the platform can turn into a steady source of income.

Founded in 2011, Depop was one of the first apps that brought buyers and sellers together directly. Depop now has offices in London, Los Angeles, New York and Milan, counts US models Dita Von Teese and Emily Ratajkowski among its users, and has collaborated with the likes of Nike and Converse.

But how did a niche clothing app evolve into a bona fide social network? “In 2011, there weren’t any apps where you could buy and sell things like that,” explains Simon Beckerman, Depop’s co-founder and head of design. “I tried to implement all of the things which this new generation had with other products, so it was like Instagram with a buy button.

"Young people, who used their phones a lot and are used to social networks, found that it was easy to use. We also wanted to create a community around it – so creating new experiences, new trends – through this kind of discovery feature.”

The company’s emphasis is on users, says CEO Maria Raga. “Depop is very much a community driven fashion platform". The development team keeps a close eye on its users, with new features only being rolled out once many users have asked for them. For example, adding a messaging function has made it more likely that users will talk to each other if they have a problem with an item, or want to know how it would fit them if they have a different body type.

Sellers on the app, who might have started as teenagers flogging things they used to wear or found in local second-hand stores, are often now considered influencers, racking up thousands of followers on Instagram and clothing deals too. Fiona Short, who runs Fifi’s Closet (an account with more than 161,0000 followers), says Depop is more than about making money.

“It’s a community of creatives,” she says. “I’ve met some of my friends through Depop, I’ve been able to support my studies, and travel and do things I wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise.”

The range is eclectic. Depop lists clothing that was fashionable 10 years ago, alongside the most recent Supreme drop. Beckerman says it’s part of the appeal. “On our explore section, we don’t show the things which we think are trendy, but the things which we think could be.”

Reselling used clothing also speaks strongly to the popularity of the circular economy; why bin clothing that’s still perfectly wearable, and that might hit somebody else’s fashion sweet spot? “Young people are increasingly connected to the circular economy and are looking for more opportunities to behave in a more sustainable way,” says Isabelle Szmigin, professor of marketing at Birmingham University.

For Thomas Platenga, CEO of second-hand clothing app Vinted, it’s a key part of the concept: “If all of us started to consume secondhand clothing instead of fast fashion, then this problem will be partly solved.”

Depop hardly spends anything on advertising, because it can rely on “organic growth” that’s driven by word of mouth. That also means that Depop has to allow its sellers to set some of the direction, like when they come and host workshops or take photos at Depop’s London office; the company in turn tries to help its top sellers to grow their own business, with workshops on how to file their taxes, for examples, or do their accounts.

“Fashion is a really elitist industry,” says Raga. “Allowing people to just list an item, getting the community to dictate whether it’s cool or not – that’s what works.”

Findings:

Quick profit
Social
Sustainable
TA: 13-25
Eco-conscious
Original
Uniqueness - no-one can just pick it up of a hanger and buy a repeatedly produced item
Student orientated platform
90s & 00s inspired aesthetics are popular
Vibrant but professional

Top Sellers

Forward:

@oliviacook06 with nearly 50,000 followers and a 90s street aesthetic, with her own shop which she’s nicknamed WEIRDO.

Celia Hodgson’s Depop store (@celiasells) is quieter and quainter, pulling on the heartstrings of nostalgic fandom. “Handpicked vintage & preloved garms,” says the British 19-year-old. She also cites some brand validation — “top 500 Depop sellers” — meaning hers is ranked among the most visited of the platform’s accounts. Her profile picture? The perma-trendy Kate Moss. “Depop has a very particular, savvy market,” she says. “I’m tapping into the teenage girl who is looking for vintage, uniquely styled clothes that they’re not going to find on the high street. These girls want individuality.”

Curation is key. “One of the things Depop has always advised is to take care of your listings as if they were fashion editorials — or, you know, features in a magazine,” says Founder Beckerman. The most successful merchants, work like art directors, arranging their wares with all manner of styling tricks. “You see everything, from selfies to street style to cool backgrounds and little props.”

The Depop sales lingo is a millennial art. ‘Hit me wiv sum offaz,’ reads one seller’s biography.

Existing Branding:

There is an obvious existing difference between individuals own brands and them reselling existing clothing. My client should conform with the latter and focus on the eco-conscious and ethically sourced side of the profiles.

The general tone of voice is colourful, loud and playful. It lacks professionalism and is a lot more post-modern / lo-fi / DIY in its outputs. The general vibe is very blog-like and the youthful age group that dominates his platform is certainly translated through the existing top profiles. There is definitely a place in the market for a strong yet colourful logotype, as well as some illustrative and promotional motion graphics and stills to share on the page.

General Visual Aesthetic & Company Identity: