A vibrant value-hacking marketplace that allows clothing resale businesses to be built from bedrooms.
Sustainable fashion upcyclers + Gen Z side hustlers
With a focus on circularity and equity, Depop is a fashion marketplace app where members of Gen Z come together to sell and buy unique items to make fashion more inclusive, diverse, and kinder for the planet.
Depop has built a fashion platform centered on sustainability, fluidity of self-expression, and empathy—all values Gen Z deeply identifies with. It’s a platform where the younger generation, especially Black and queer youths, finds a fuller expression that oozes between race, gender, sexuality, culture, and language, as expressed through fashion and style.
Tapping into the side-hustle culture, Depop and social media, allow Gen Z to grow their business in a non-traditional way. Influencers are creating a new brand currency that Depop describes as “clout" or a social stock market, a combination of followers, brand power, social credentials, and status that travel across platforms, including Instagram and TikTok even IRL.
Interconnection and “repopping” are the heartbeat of Depop. By design, the platform is one big community of micro-communities with members inspiring each other in their styles and values. Depop has launched a Sustainability Incubator Program to support growth and social solidarity, which curates a wealth of resources in their Depop Seller Handbook, a B-school to help members master the business fundamentals and grow their businesses.
Depop members mobilize through micro-communities, with members more likely to support each other instead of a larger cause. (They’re already engaged in the larger cause of sustainability.) One of the best examples of this small-scale phenomenon is Tik Tok influencer Emma Rogue, who opened an IRL shop in NYC named after her Depop account, attracting 400 followers and lines around a city block on launch day.