Christina Dolan and Rachel Ackerman run a thrifting business, where they thrift and alter clothes to sell on their Instagram account @TwoGirlsGoThrift. This Talon exclusive gets to know the young entrepreneurs.

What is your business model?

Christina: First we go to thrift stores and buy the clothes.We’ll then usually go to a location, probably in Avondale where all the graffiti is or somewhere else naturey. We then take pictures of the clothes and post them on Instagram for bids. The bidding period is usually twenty four hours.

How do you acquire product?

Rachel: We get the clothes from thrift stores, namely Goodwill or Community Thrift. Sometimes we’ll go out of town to Columbia, Manning, or Augusta to get clothes, too.

Why do you use Instagram to sell your clothes?

Rachel: We use Instagram for our business because it reaches a lot more people than a website would. Our posts pop up on everyone’s feed whenever get something new, so we figured it would be the most successful method for us to sell  our product. We put all of our items on individual posts, and then people bid in the comments.

Christina: Yeah, we were inspired by accounts like @redrosevintageshop and a bunch of other people who do the same thing. We just figured Instagram would be the most accessible way for people to follow us and continually see our product.

What inspires the alterations to your clothes?

Christina: I guess just the trends of the day. You know crop tops, crop sweatshirts, anything like that. We alter the clothes anyway we can to make them seem more high fashion, like what’s sold at Urban Outfitters.

Rachel: Especially jean shorts. Every pair of jean shorts we’ve sold used to be jeans.

Christina: And we do all the rips ourselves. All the fraying and distressing.

What does the process look like from the purchase to shipping of a product?

Christina: One of us washes the product and does the alterations, probably hemming and cropping, and then we take pictures of  the piece and post it on Instagram with the BIN price (buy it now), sizing, and how long it’ll be up for bids. Once someone buys it, we DM back and forth to get their Venmo and address. We buy our packages from Amazon in advance and use Pirate Ship to print out the labels. We then put together the package and drop it off at the post office. And then it’s out.

Why did you become passionate about thrifting?

Christina: Because we’re broke.

Rachel: I think it’s really relaxing, and if I feel stressed out it’s nice to go and spend time not thinking about anything and just look through clothes.

What advice would you give for successful thrifting? 

Rachel: You should always look in the men’s section, even if you’re a girl. I’m such a firm believer in this because you’ll find all the nice sweatshirts and old graphic tees there. If you’re looking for a specific item, you should check the entire store because items are misplaced a lot of the time, so you should look through everything to find what you’re looking for.

Christina: It takes a while, but if you pop in some headphones and really go for it, then you’ll be most successful.

Rachel. When we go thrifting for product, we’re there for hours. There have been times when I’ve been in stores for over two hours.

Christina: Once you do it a lot, you get to a point where you can just walk down the aisle and scan for what’s good. That’s what I can do now, and I’m able to just pick out things.

What have you learned from your business?

Rachel: Definitely how to be professional with customers, especially when people back out of deals. It’s upsetting, but you just have to be professional and move on.

Christina: As the owner, you need to be professional and the bigger person in all situations because it’s your reputation and business on the line. At the end of the day, your business matters more than being right.

What advice would you like to impart on the entrepreneurs of Magnet? 

Christina: Just do it

Rachel: Definitely go for it, if you want to do something. We delayed starting our business for a long time because we thought nobody would buy anything, but our first post actually ended up doing really well. So, if you put a lot of work into it, then it’ll work out.

Christina: Always be open to improvement. Always change your model to be better. When we started, we didn’t make any alterations or anything like that, and now that’s some our most popular stuff.

Final comments? 

Christina: Yeah, follow us @twogirlsgothrift

Rachel: And men’s clothes are coming soon, stay tuned.