Thredup.com Review

posted by Kristen

When my husband recently told me to check out a new website he'd stumbled across, thredUP.com, I was intrigued. I've been stocking up on baby clothes for our son, due in early October, at our local Once Upon A Child. The thredUP concept seemed like a great idea; basically like a big, online, multi-family clothing swap. I signed up for an account and, a few days later, received a pack of USPS flat-rate Priority shipping boxes in the mail, to be used for sending out clothes that I wanted to get rid of. The next step was choosing a box. Aaron and I sat down together and searched under the criteria we needed: boys newborn fall/winter. We found a list of boxes with brief descriptions of the contents. In some cases, when the person listing the box had already sent out previous boxes, there was a rating given by the receivers to indicate the quality of the sender. We ended up choosing a box filled with newborn and 0-3 size pajamas. All we had to do was pay shipping through Paypal, and the lister was notified to send the box our way.

After that, I was asked to list my own box of clothing. Per the packing instructions on thredUP, I stuffed a box full of fall clothing that our eight-year-old daughter had outgrown. ThredUP has a simple interface for describing the contents of the box, and there was a comments section where I was able to add that the clothes were not ripped or stained, and from a smoke-free home. Although thredUP has prominently displayed on the site that they're in need of larger kids' clothes, my box of 6/6x/7 clothes still hasn't been chosen, which means that I can't order another box of clothes for the baby yet. This brings me to one of my criticisms of what otherwise seems like a good system. The site seems great for those with babies or toddlers with a high turnover rate of clothes, but probably not as useful for older kids, who may go for significantly longer periods of time before outgrowing a boxful of clothes that can be listed on thredUP. Although I could list multiple boxes on the site, I don't really have enough of our daughter's old clothes to make up a second box yet.

We received our box in the mail today, which was stuffed full of newborn pj's and onesies, as promised. There was also a note from the sender letting us know that she'd added a few items because she noticed that a few of the original items were stained, a nice bonus. A few of the items were things that I normally would have passed over at Once Upon A Child, not because of condition, but due to style, but overall it was a great box of cute stuff that left us totally stocked for newborn clothing. Which leads me to my second criticism of thredUP: a lot of the items listed under our chosen criteria were stylistically things that I probably wouldn't have chosen in a second-hand store, a lot of mentions of character-themed clothing (Sesame Street, Disney) that I don't personally care for and also old-school gendered clothing with football and other sports, trains, tools, etc. that aren't really my thing either. I think as long as people are clear in their descriptions about this sort of thing, it's okay, but I'd be disappointed if I thought I was getting a more neutral box and ended up with a bunch of clothes that I wouldn't end up using.

For some of the same reasons, I'm not sure whether thredUP would work for our daughter, who has a definite sense of style and really needs to see the clothes and be able to try them on before we buy them for her. We'd be safer buying her clothes from Once Upon A child, where this is possible. But I think that thredUP will work for our son for several years to come, provided somebody picks our boxes!