For some people, buying secondhand fashion is a passion. For many more, it's a headache.
Whichever side you're on, the problems are the same. The endless scrolling. The tab hopping. The nagging feeling that the perfect piece must exist somewhere, if only you could find it.
In theory, shopping secondhand should be simple. It's better for the planet, better for your wallet, and a brilliant way to uncover pieces with a bit of soul. In reality, it's a maze. Most shoppers bounce between eBay, Vinted, Depop, charity shops and niche resale sites, typing the same search terms, opening ten tabs at once, and hoping they haven't missed something better on another platform.
The market itself has gone mainstream. UK resale fashion is now worth more than £7 billion, with nearly one in four fashion transactions involving resale, according to OC&C Strategy Consultants. Vinted alone has more than 17 million UK users, per Barclays. The supply isn't the problem. Discovery is.
That's the problem Aseel Showman, founder of Thrifter Club, set out to fix.
What is Thrifter Club?
Thrifter Club is a search tool that pulls listings from multiple secondhand marketplaces into one place, so you only have to search once.
You don't need to know which platform stocks what brand, or where the best deals usually live, or which app has the size you need. You type in what you're looking for, and Thrifter Club searches eBay, Vinted, Thrift+ and other resale sites at the same time. If you'd rather show than tell, there's an image search feature too. Snap a photo of something you saw on the street and Thrifter Club will look for similar pieces secondhand.
How does Thrifter Club work?
You search, Thrifter Club returns results pulled from multiple marketplaces, and you filter down by size, brand, condition or price. When you find something you like, you click through and buy it on the original site. Thrifter Club doesn't take payment, hold inventory, or get between you and the seller.
The image search works a little differently. You upload a picture of an item you've spotted somewhere, an outfit on TikTok, a coat in a shop window, a bag on a friend, and Thrifter Club returns visually similar listings across the marketplaces it covers. It's the answer to the everyday secondhand problem of knowing the vibe you want but having no idea what to type into a search bar.
The model itself is closer to Skyscanner than to Vinted. Thrifter Club isn't another marketplace competing for inventory. It sits on top of the marketplaces and helps you search across the ones that already exist. Free to use, with a single search bar, and built around the idea that the listings you want already exist somewhere. They just need to be findable.
Marketplaces want you to see more results, not necessarily better ones, because more results mean more chances of an impulse buy. Thrifter Club has no such incentive. It just wants to get you to the right item faster.
Meet the founder: Aseel Showman
Aseel was a thrifter long before she was a founder.
She furnished her first place with secondhand pieces she still owns today, and used resale to bring quality clothes into her wardrobe without paying full retail. Thrifter Club came directly out of her own frustration as a buyer, swapping between marketplaces, typing the same search terms, saving items, then forgetting which app she'd saved them on.
Before all this she spent years in management consulting. Sustainability had always been on her mind, partly because she grew up in a household where not being wasteful was a shared family value. The Thrifter Club idea bounced around her head for years while she was working. When her last consulting role came to an end, she took it as a sign and went all in.
She's a first-time, solo, non-technical founder, which means she's also taught herself how to build the product. The website first, the mobile app next, and an AI search feature in between. Impressive stuff!
Why we love Thrifter Club
The secondhand market in the UK has grown up with over a quarter of all fashion sales now resale. But the experience of actually shopping hasn't kept pace. Anyone who's tried to find a specific piece across five apps knows that.
Thrifter Club is a sensible answer to that problem, and the fact that the marketplaces themselves haven't built one is the most interesting thing about it. They have no reason to. An aggregator that compares prices across competitors is exactly the tool an incumbent never builds. So a thrifter built it instead.
We also like that it's narrow. Thrifter Club isn't trying to become a marketplace, or a community, or a sustainability brand with a manifesto. It's a search tool. It does one thing well, and the one thing it does is the thing the rest of the category quietly hopes you don't notice you need.
We'll be watching this one.
You can try Thrifter Club today at thrifter.club, and follow along at @thrifter_club_ for updates including the upcoming app launch.
We sat down with Aseel to learn more about Thrifter Club and how she's making secondhand shopping feel less like a scavenger hunt. You can listen to the full conversation on The Discovery Call podcast on Spotify or YouTube below.