Hello from Florida

No, for the most part I think your perspective is correct. I’m not looking for clothing or commodity items though…I’m looking for old hats. They are light and cheap, and some of them do really well. Granted, I have my fair share of $10-$15 hats in those batches that I pull out too, but there are always some winners. The bins are quite an experience though. I really have to psych myself up to go. There are some regulars in there who would elbow their own child in the face to get to a pair of Nikes first. It’s off-putting to say the least.

Yeah, I definitely don’t love the bin experience either, but it can be productive for what I’m looking for. I can’t be bothered to look through the clothes bins for the most part though…I don’t feel like weeding through piles of stained Forever 21 clothes to find one treasure. Garage sales are plentiful where I live, but yet they are also hit-or-miss. I live in a unique area though, where Wal-Mart stuff is apparently highly prized at yard sales and thrift stores while midcentury modern furniture and accessories end up on the curb or in the dumpster! Estate sales can be good here, particularly ones run by families themselves instead of by companies.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 7 months ago by ChristineK.

Right now that’s all I’m finding at yard sales…well, that and holiday decorations. It does worry me when suddenly that’s all I see at yard sales. I have no interest in even cheaply-priced commodity items unless it’s something I need for my family. Winter stuff is definitely cheap here. I always laugh when people are selling their winter gear at their yard sale…snowboards and winter gear just aren’t big sellers here no matter how cheap!

The yard sales I really like are the “grandma/pa went to the nursing home” type sales. I love vintage stuff! I haven’t lucked into any of those sales lately unfortunately, but hopefully it’s just a matter of time.

Yes, my inventory is about 70%-80% hats/vintage snapbacks. I average between 800-1100 listings at any given time, with some listings being mostly other random vintage stuff that I find. Average price is $14.95 with free shipping (sometimes less if I put on a sale), but I have a fair number of outliers on the higher end also. I’ve sold them as high as $80 for rare country club/golf club hats. I tend to avoid anything sports related (other than golf) because those just don’t interest me and they are too mass market in my experience. I seem to sell pretty consistently at about $600-$800 a week, although this week has been slow. The inventory comes mainly from the goodwill bins and box lots at estate sales and yard sales, and I try not to pay more than $1 a hat unless it’s something I know will go high.

Someone at the goodwill bins told me that there is an auction area at the goodwill locally where you can bid on boxes full of specific items (hats, belts, ties, etc.) so I’m looking into that also. I’d love to just be able to pay a set price for a large box of hats and then go through them at home…much nicer than dealing with the crazed regulars at the bins!

That volume sounds a little high. I’d say I average 75-100 hats a month. They are the majority of my sales. I do sell some other stuff in there too. I have seen a decline in what I can sell hats for in about the past year (with the exception of the special ones). $14.95 is about my standard hat sale, and sometimes I also put them on sale. I do free shipping because when I’ve added shipping it seemed like my sales volume declined. I have a fair number of outliers, although lately those seem fewer and farther between so I think your assessment that the days of $20-$40 trucker hats may be gone. I used to have outlier hat sales pretty much daily, but that is definitely no longer the case. Sourcing is becoming an issue for me honestly. Sometimes I go to the Goodwill outlet and there are a ton of hats, but sometimes I go and there are none or just a few. Same with yard sales/estate sales. I’ve had great luck and then dry spells in terms of sourcing, which is why I’m trying to branch out. Hats are just so easy to list and ship though.

Are you paying a high price for your trucker hats or are you getting them out of box lots for cheap? If it’s the latter, why not just try an experiment to reduce them to $14.95 (or whatever price you’re comfortable with) and see if they move? The volume makes up for the price reduction if they suddenly start moving. I wouldn’t do this if I paid like $5 a hat or something, but if you’re getting them for 99 cents a pound or in a $5 box lot it’s not a huge loss to move a bunch of them for a lower price.

In terms of shipping, I use both polymailers and boxes. The hats that are slouchy with no firmness to the front of the hat go in a polymailer. The hats that are more stiff on the front and could get squished go in a box. I aim to keep the box under 8oz hat included, but that’s not always possible. Some end up as high as 12 ounces. They always ship first class though.

I totally hear you! Sometimes I feel like I’m shipping out a lot of items a day to only make $100 that day. Hats are easy to ship though, so overall I can’t complain. I’m always happy for higher dollar sales on anything though, hats or otherwise. I just did my numbers on the podcast thread, and I sold 74 hats in Oct. Surprisingly, they were not the majority of my sales last month, but it was an odd month in that a friend let me come take what I wanted from a house she was “trashing out” to flip. There was a lot of good vintage stuff in that house free for the taking. I’ve also been having an inventory dry spell in terms of finding my usual volume of hats to list. Fingers crossed that this turns around soon. I’ve been investigating auctions as a possibility, but we don’t really seem to have any worth going to around here. I may have to try the flea market a few towns over. I’m wide open to suggestions of other places to find box lots of hats for cheap.

From your post above, I wanted to say that I sell between $600-$800 a week total. Hats are by far my biggest category of sales, but I’m not selling $600-$800 of hats alone a week.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 7 months ago by ChristineK.

Thanks!! Yes, hats are about 70%-80% of my inventory at any given time. I’d sell just hats if I could find enough reliable inventory, but that just isn’t happening for me lately. Maybe I’m not searching correctly, but I can’t seem to find auctions in my area beyond one that just looks like pure junk from the pictures they post on facebook. Maybe there are more in cities an hour away. Really though, I live in God’s waiting room here in coastal FL. You’d think auctions of estates would be a dime a dozen here! I do find estate sales, but so many are run by the same companies that just massively overprice everything. I try to go on the last day and sometimes I do well with that.

Maybe I’ll give the auction a try then. It’s weird. The stuff they put out every week on Facebook is nearly the same as the stuff from the week before. It looks like they don’t move much. Well, the only way to find out is to go to it I guess!

I’ve though about putting ads on CL…my husband didn’t think it would work, but I think it’s worth a try. At this point I’m willing to try anything that would net me a lot of hats at once and reduce the running around to bins and yard sales. I would need him to go with me to pick them up though for safety reasons. If I could get hundreds of old hats at a whack it would be totally worth it though!