We made an extra £1,000 last month. Here’s how you can too.
Not a course, not a list of items to go and buy. Seven steps, in the order you’d actually do them, with our real numbers attached — including the bit at the end where we show what was left after the stock, the packaging and the postage came out.
You can follow every step of this without paying us a penny. Where our software genuinely removes a piece of work, we say so and move on.
1
Decide what you’re looking for
Do not buy “anything that looks nice”. That is how you end up with forty things you cannot price and a spare room you cannot use.
Pick a narrow lane and learn it properly: one or two categories, a handful of brands, and a condition you are willing to accept. Jess started with women’s coats and knitwear from high-street brands — Zara, Mint Velvet, Monsoon, Next — because she already knew what they felt like new, which is most of the skill.
You are trying to get to the point where you can tell, across a shop, whether a rail is worth walking to.
OursRoughly 80% of what we sell is still women’s clothing from about a dozen brands.
What Very Minted doesThe sourcing map and buying report show which shops actually pay you back — a Pro feature, and the least finished part of the product.
2
Know what to pay, before you pay it
This is the single skill that decides whether any of this works. Everything else is admin.
The number you need is not “what is this worth”. It is “what does this actually sell for, second-hand, in the condition it is in, this month”. Those are different numbers and the gap between them is where beginners lose money.
Free way to do it: search the item on Vinted or eBay, then filter to sold or completed listings. Asking prices tell you what sellers hope for; sold prices tell you what buyers did. Only one of those pays you.
Then work backwards. If it sold for £24, and you want to clear £15, you have about £6 to spend once packaging and the odd postage cost come out. Above that, walk away. There is always another coat.
OursOur average buy price in June was £2.28 an item. Average sale, £11.82.
What Very Minted doesThis is Mint. Point your phone at the thing and it identifies it, checks what it has actually been selling for, and gives you a range plus buy, haggle or walk — before you reach the till. The free plan includes a go.
MintVALUE MODE
Show me what you’ve found.
Looking at your photosM&S Cotton Twill JacketChecking what these sell forchecked against live sold listingsWorking out your price
Had a look at your photos — very good condition.
Resells for about£22–29based on live sold listings
Strong buy. Pay £4.50, clear about £21 after postage.
A real jacket from Jess’s shop — £4.50 in a Luton charity shop, sold on Vinted for £26. Sped up: a real valuation takes about fifteen seconds.
Two items can be worth the same and behave completely differently. One goes in four days, the other sits for four months. Your money is in the first kind.
What moves for us: outerwear, knitwear, anything with a recognisable brand, and anything seasonal bought a month before its season. What sits: fast-fashion tops, anything unbranded, and formalwear outside December and wedding season.
The unglamorous truth is that a £6 coat that sells in a week beats a £30 dress that sells in five months, because the coat lets you buy the next coat.
OursJune: 86 items sold. The fastest went in under 48 hours; a handful had been listed since March.
What Very Minted doesValuations show the comparable sales behind a price, so you can see how much evidence a number is standing on.
4
Get it ready properly
This is the boring one. It is also where most of the margin is actually made, and no software can do it for you — including ours.
Wash or steam everything. Check seams, zips, buttons and armpits in daylight before you list, not after someone complains. Do the ten-minute repairs: a missing button, a loose hem, a bobbled sleeve with a fabric shaver.
Then photograph it on a hanger against a plain wall in daylight. Not on the floor, not at night, not on the sofa. Front, back, label, and a close-up of any flaw you are declaring. Daylight and a plain wall are worth more than any camera.
A £3 coat that is clean, steamed and photographed well sells for £28. The identical coat photographed on a bed at 11pm sells for £12, eventually.
OursPackaging cost us £30.66 in June — mailers, tape, tissue. That is the whole prep budget.
What Very Minted doesNothing. We teach this and we automate none of it. Anyone telling you their tool handles this part is selling you something.
There are two prices for anything: the one that gets it sold, and the one that gets it looked at and left. The gap is usually about three pounds.
Waiting is not free. An item sitting unsold for four months is money you cannot spend on stock that would have turned over twice in the same period. That is the real cost, and almost nobody counts it.
So: price it to sell, and if it has not moved in a month, mark it down rather than defending the number you first thought of.
What Very Minted doesIt flags stock that has stopped moving and tells you when a markdown is worth more than the wait.
Vinted moves clothing fastest. eBay pays better for almost everything that is not clothing — homeware, tools, electronics, menswear, anything with a model number.
Listing the same item in both places roughly doubles the chance of it selling this month. The catch is writing it twice, which is where people give up.
If you do this by hand: write the listing once in a note on your phone, and paste it into both.
What Very Minted doesIt writes the listing from your photos — title, description, category, size, condition — and posts it to eBay in a tap. Sell it on Vinted and it takes the eBay listing down for you, so the same thing cannot sell twice.
Money in is not money kept, and the difference is the number most sellers never work out.
Sales, minus what the stock cost, minus packaging, minus postage and anything else you paid for. What is left is the real answer to “is this worth my Saturday”.
Here is ours, in full, so you can see the shape of it.
June 2026 · 86 items sold
Money in
£1,016.87
What the stock cost
−£196.50
Packaging
−£30.66
Postage, fees, subscriptions
−£52.69
What was left
£737.02
July 2026 · 69 items sold
Money in
£1,097.75
What the stock cost
−£246
Packaging
−£29.97
Postage, fees, subscriptions
−£49.01
What was left
£772.77
Two months, one household, our own shop. Not a projection, not typical, and not a promise about what you would make. On Vinted the buyer pays the selling fees, which is why “money in” is the full sale price. We also sell on eBay from a private account, where UK sellers have paid no selling fees since October 2024.
What Very Minted doesEvery sale is logged against what the item cost, so the profit figure is there without a spreadsheet — including the VAT margin scheme and the exports an accountant asks for.
A list of exact items to go and buy works because those items are mispriced. Sell that list to 500 people and they all chase the same stock — and the edge is gone. Every copy sold makes every copy worth less.
Pricing the thing in your hand, today, does not decay that way. That is the whole reason we built a tool rather than wrote a guide.
Start with one item.
Not a shop, not a spare room full of stock. One thing you already own or one thing from a charity shop, run through the whole seven steps. You will know more after that than from any amount of reading — including this.
