Many people want to sell their old clothing at vintage stores, however, the wait times are often too long. Adding to frustration, some clothes get declined for rather simple reasons. Vintage Pre-check lets users pre-check their clothes with stores, reducing wait times for customers and increasing sales for stores.
Defining Problems
Some friends of mine often went to vintage clothing stores to sell their clothes. After tagging along a couple times, I noticed some common problems:
Wait times are too long
The image shows 2nd STREET Melrose, a popular vintage clothing store, with a line forming just five minutes after doors opened on a weekday morning. Upon reaching their turn, the sixth customer was told their wait time would be 40 minutes to 1 hour. The customer appeared disappointed and walked out without dropping off their clothes.
A different customer stated in an online review that their 2 and a half hour wait turned into 7 hours.
Clothes are declined for simple reasons
Vintage clothing stores are very particular about the kind of items they have on display. Certain brands as well as unknown brands may be declined straight away.
For example, one of the staff told me:
“I feel bad having to make some customers wait over 45 minutes, just to tell them that we don’t take Christian Dior shoes.”
Customers are frustrated by long waits, while staff feel bad making them wait
User Research
Side A: How do customers approach selling clothes?
I conducted a quick poll in different thrift shops to gauge how people approached selling their clothes.
Most people were selling 10-20 items
A couple people brought multiple bags, with probably 20+ items
86% of people selling less than 20 items were open to pre-checking their clothes, while people who brought clothing in bulk commented they'd rather just drop it off and come back at a later day.
Side B: How do stores appraise clothes?
In order to implement a pre-check, it was necessary to find out what the staff look for when examining people's clothing. I asked a store associate, and some of the standards included:
Brand
Trend
Season
Condition
"I still have to look at the clothes and feel the fabric to make a final decision. I'll also look at things like the care tags to make sure they're authentic."
This indicates that some degree of physical inspection is required. Still, a pre-check would greatly streamline the inspection process.
A solution for both sides
The problems above got me thinking: what if stores could check clothes beforehand? If it's as simple as not accepting certain brands, certainly there's no need to wait an hour for that?
I thought of an app that would let users:
Submit their clothes for review
Choose an appointment time
I visited multiple thrift shops in the area, all of which had customers sitting around waiting for their turn. I asked the store associates about the service and they all showed positive interest.
“Yeah I always wished we could have a system like that to do a quick check beforehand.”
With the proposed flow, customers will choose a store and post the clothes they'd like to get reviewed.
Store Associates will then go through the clothes, accepting or declining each item.
Customers will then view their pre-check results and choose a time to drop by.
*Customers who prefer to sell clothing in bulk can choose to skip the pre-check and simply choose a drop off time
I initially planned the flow to have appointment scheduling and pre-check submission done simultaneously. However, user testing revealed people would prefer to make an appointment after having received their pre-check results.
Design Ideation
Customer Flow: Submitting a pre-check
The flow initially starts with the customer choosing a store, then submitting clothes for a pre-check.
User Feedback
The wireframe version of the home screen (leftmost image above) shows the stores as only a list, kind of like the list of restaurants in a food delivery app. However, users expressed during testing that having a map would help them find the store better. The design has been edited to reflect that.
(From left to right) Store profile, Adding an item for review, Pre-check list
Stores can display:
Basic store information
Lookbook / Styles accepted
Initial user research showed there were customers with a lot of clothes (20+). Some of these customers expressed manually taking pictures and entering descriptions for each of their items would be cumbersome. Since most of the customers bringing clothes in bulk plan on coming back at a later day for pickup,
and that they would rather drop off their clothes.
By having an option to book an appointment time instead of having a pre-check, customers bringing in bulk items can do so.
Store Flow: Reviewing pre-checks
Once the customer submits a pre-check for review, the store flow starts with choosing a pre-check to review.
Customer Flow: Scheduling an appointment
After reviewing the pre-check results, customers can then schedule an appointment with the store.
Preventing System Abuse
There was potential for customers to abuse the system by submitting the same pre-check to multiple stores, then choosing whichever store accepts the most clothes. This leads to wasted effort on other stores, so I came up with a few measures to prevent this.
Submission Limits: Users can submit clothes to only one store at a time, preventing overlapping efforts
Submission Fees: By charging a small fee for each pre-check, stores don't waste their time by reviewing their clothes and customers can submit clothes without limits
Measuring Success
As this is a case study, it's difficult to measure tangible impacts. However, if stores were to implement this system, here would be some things to look for:
Items submitted for pre-check: Items submitted for pre-check Are people engaging with the app?
Percentage of pre-check approval: Are clothes being properly filtered? This will save customers the hassle of bringing clothes that might be declined.
Average review time: Are there changes in efficiency of review speeds? Can the store go through more clothes?
Appointment booking rate: Is the pre-check bringing in more in-store traffic?
Cost savings: Are there any gains from the increase in operational efficiency?
Takeways
Industry Research
Vintage shopping is a very niche market; it was important to learn how both the customers and store staff interacted in order to come up with a solution. For example, things like what the store staff look for when reviewing clothes, and how customers approach selling clothes.