This week, full-time shoe reseller Ryan from RNZY joins us to talk about how he and his wife Lindsay have built up their online shoe selling business and have sold more than 26,000 pairs of shoes on Poshmark, Mercari, and Facebook Marketplace while maintaining a healthy work/life balance.
The Seller Community Podcast from List Perfectly is the ecommerce resource for the seller community across all platforms and a hub for information on growing your business. Find out more at thesellercommunitypodcast.com, leave a message or ask a question at anchor.fm/sellercommunitypodcast, or email us at podcast@listperfectly.com.
List Perfectly is the ecommerce resource for selling across multiple e-commerce platforms including eBay, Poshmark, Etsy, Mercari, Kidizen, Grailed, Depop, Tradesy, Facebook Marketplace, Instagram, and Shopify.
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Episode Links
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RNZY Mercari
Transcript
Doug:
Welcome to The Seller Community Podcast from List Perfectly. This is season two, episode 27. This week, we have another awesome episode. RNZY, AKA RNZYNOW are Ryan and Lindsay, and they’re very accomplished shoe sellers. Ryan joined us recently to talk about how they’ve built up their online shoe-selling business and sold more than 27,000 pairs of shoes across the board. And as a testament to their work-life balance, Lindsay couldn’t make it because she was taking care of their new baby, but they talk about that, they talk about the multi-layered business they’ve built up after doing each aspect of it themselves, and then they also talk about community, how they give back and you have to hear about what they’re doing to help other shoe sellers. It’s pretty amazing. Let’s listen in on Ryan from RNZY and find out about their no excuses, honest, adaptive, and motivated shoe-selling business.
Doug:
RNZYNOW, Ryan, and Lindsay are full-time shoe resellers based in Maine. They’ve sold more than 26,000 pairs of shoes on Poshmark, Mercari, and Facebook marketplace. I did the math. So 26,000 pairs is 52,000 shoes <laugh> everyone.
Ryan:
Yeah.
Doug:
They have a multi-layer business with employees, and a new baby, and enjoy a nice work-life balance. And how do they do it? We’re gonna find out. Ryan’s with us today. Lindsay’s taking care of the baby, but that’s okay. Ryan, thanks for taking the time, and welcome to the show.
Ryan:
Clara, Doug, I really appreciate you having us on and allowing us to answer some questions.
Doug:
Awesome.
Clara:
Absolutely. Ryan, I’m so excited you were able to join us today because your journey is something that I am very, very interested in sharing with our audience. So why don’t we start from the beginning, okay, with the most basic ones, how did you get into online reselling?
Ryan:
Online reselling for us began in 2017. Lindsay was let go from her job and I was working as a bartender in downtown Portland, and we were kind of pushed into a scenario where we had seen a lot of other people be very successful, you know, through social media being full-time resellers. And we kind of got pushed into the situation where we said to ourselves, you know, what, why don’t we try it? And if we can hit our goals for the first month, then game on, but if we don’t, then we can always go back and get,you know, another job that pays the bills. And we were off and running. We started with everything in our house and then eventually we whittled it down to shoes because we enjoyed interacting with people about shoes, as opposed to, you know, the second toaster that we had or the wooden bowls on the counter or the, you know, the free weights that we weren’t using. <laugh> and so we really whittled it down and we made some good money in the first month and that was back in 2017 and, and we decided, hey, let’s do this full time. And we haven’t looked back.
Clara:
You have a multi-layered business with employees. All right. How is that set up? And how long did it take you to get there?
Ryan:
The multi-layered for us means is there a way that we could, when we first were thinking about it, is there a way that we could build a team that would help us grow our business? With the sole goal of obviously freeing up time, because we didn’t become full-time shoe resellers to work 23 hours a day or, or kind of being trapped in our own business. We’ve seen a lot of people where it turns into a thing where they don’t like it as much because they think they’re forced to do all these things at such a crazy level. And so the multi-layered version of our business was we needed to first do all the things that we were gonna hire a team to do. We needed to do it, to do it ourselves, like, well over 10,000 times. So when it came to obviously sourcing shoes, cleaning the shoes, listing the shoes, photographing the shoes like we had sold well over 10,000 pairs of shoes…
Clara:
Wow.
Ryan:
…Before We even thought about building a team. Yeah. We’re very conscious too, of what it means to employ other people. As we were building a team, had to make sure we were balancing both sides. Right. We, wanted to make sure that the people we were hiring we’re getting paid very well, but we also had to make sure it made sense within our profit and loss within the business with respect to our cost for shoes and how much they were actually selling for on the marketplaces and how long it took to do the things that we were hiring people, you know, it doesn’t make sense to pay someone you know, a couple of cents to clean a pair of shoes when you know, what effort it takes to go into that. But it also doesn’t make sense to pay someone a hundred dollars to clean a pair of shoes when they don’t sell that much. We have an amazing team that loves to work with us because they’re in control of how much money they make. And when they work they just tell us like, Hey, you know, I wanna make X amount of money this week. And that means X amount of shoes, X amount of listings of things of that nature. So hopefully that answers your question.
Clara:
How did you get to that love of, you know, shoes? Is that something because you like wearing them or selling them, or what’s the behind story?
Ryan:
One of the cliche things you hear all the time is like, if you love what you do, you don’t ever work a day in your life when it comes to reselling. I think a lot of people get trapped in thinking they have to resell everything. I understand that mentality because you really can sell anything. And we realized early on, as I said earlier, where we were trying everything, right. We had extra wooden bowls in the cupboard. So we were selling those on Facebook. We, of course, had extra shoes in our closet. So we were selling those. We were selling toasters. We were selling VCRs real early on. I’m talking in like the first week or two. And we just realized that when people messaged us about shoes and they were asking questions, it was fun. But when people were messaging us about the VCR, it wasn’t as fun.
Ryan:
Like it’s as simple as that. And so <laugh>, we decided, all right, let’s focus on the thing that we enjoy, which is shoes, and try to build that business. We’ve actually, you, you mentioned in the beginning, we’ve sold over 26,000. We’ve actually just passed 27,000 pairs of shoes. But the reason I reiterate is that we haven’t even scratched the surface of the potential of, you know, the used shoe side of reselling. And so we just thoroughly enjoy interacting with what we’re selling when it comes to sourcing it, cleaning it, listing everything that’s involved with being a successful reseller.
Doug:
You clarified how many pairs of shoes you’ve sold and you’ve been particularly successful on Poshmark. So please tell us about your Poshmark strategy a little bit, and let’s talk about that.
Ryan:
Poshmark has been amazing for us. When we first started posh mark, I was trying to make it like a Facebook Marketplace. I, the reason I mention that is I think it’s important. We’ve learned over the last five years that it’s important to understand each marketplace that you use for what it is, and all the pros and cons that are involved with that marketplace. And the first three months, I was literally just trying to make it like a Facebook Marketplace once I said, all right, what is Poshmark all about? How can we use the tools that are offered specifically on Poshmark that may not be offered on other marketplaces to really grow our business? Then it really started taking off on Poshmark. So if you’re asking about a specific strategy, I mean, some of the obvious things that can apply to every marketplace that it applies to Poshmark for sure are making sure that you source shoes that are selling well on Poshmark.
Ryan:
I mean, you can look up completed sales of the pairs that you’re looking at in the thrift store, you know, or in the retail store that you’re looking to flip and make a profit on, and you can kind of gauge, are they selling high enough for me to make a profit? When I base it against my buy cost, now that’s obvious reselling stuff. But when it comes to Poshmark, over time, we’ve realized that around 80% of our sales come from some type of negotiation, right? Okay. Like we list, we list the pair and someone makes an offer and we accept it. Or someone makes an offer and we counter, or Poshmark has an amazing tool where you can send offers to likers/people that have shown interest in your inventory. So sometimes that converts and the reason I bring that up is we’ve leaned into that.
Ryan:
So rather than being super strict and only trying to get full-price sales, we’ve put, we’ve priced our stuff kind of at the top end of our research, like if a pair is selling between $35 and $50, we’ll price it at $49, knowing that we’re gonna be doing some negotiating and still hit our profit goals. And I think anyone that’s listening to this that’s super important. Oh, we all want full-price sales. I’m not saying we don’t want that, but if you understand that there’s always gonna be some type of negotiation. We all wanna get some type of deal. You can position yourself to lean into that and, and convert sales a lot quicker. So Poshmark wants you to be very social. I think that’s what separates it. I can’t remember. I was reading an article early, very on about Poshmark and how and I wish I could reference who was talking about it, but Poshmark was referencing places like Instagram as kind of like a competitor.
Ryan:
And that really caught my eye because I, and I think that’s very important to know because obviously it’s a buy and sell marketplace. Obviously, there’s eBay, there’s Amazon, there’s Mercari, there’s Facebook Marketplace. And they’re all trying to bring in buyers and sellers. But when I read that, I said, okay, this changes the game a little bit for us on Poshmark. If they’re trying to get people to be social and interact, how can we create scenarios where we can be social without spending all day? Do you know what I mean? Like we don’t, we can’t be spending all day on Poshmark. The reason I bring that up is we try to, with our listings, answer as many questions that people are gonna have about our pair of shoes we’re selling before they ask them. And then the social aspect becomes a lot more fun rather than like if we just put up a generic listing, here’s a pair of Nike shoes.
Ryan:
We don’t really mention what color they are because there are photos. We don’t really mention the condition. Then of course, people are gonna be like, Hey, I see a bunch of stuff. Like, what color are these specifically? What size are these? What style are these? How worn are these? Like all these things that can be answered in a, a very honest listing, eliminates that. And then you can pour into the really fun stuff in terms of the social aspect, with Poshmark, where people are saying, oh my gosh, I love your selection. I saw you had these Nike Air Max 2016s in the black, I saw you had ’em in the blue. Do you have them in pink? And I’ll talk to people all day about stuff like that. So understanding the marketplace for what it is and leaning into that rather than saying, oh, I wish it was like this, or I wish it was like that has allowed us to sell a tremendous amount of shoes on Poshmark.
Clara:
Since you’re saying that, let me ask you a question. What’s your input about the listing and relisting, or do you optimize listings when you see that something’s not getting traction, do you delist and relist, or do you update the content of the listing?
Ryan:
We’re not big fans of delisting and re-listing, but as marketplaces evolve, I can’t remember how long ago, but Poshmark, I think it was within the last year, allowed you to have long titles. When I think about delisting and relisting, we don’t do it because inventory isn’t selling, we have started doing stuff where we’ll go in and like improve the listing because now you can include more characters, which means, yeah, you can get more descriptive with your titles. You can add more colors, you can add all these other things. You can add the size into the title for all these things. So that’s how we re-list stuff. But the way we’ve always thought about delisting and relisting is that if you have to do it by, by all means, do it like we’re no one’s perfect. We can, we’re always improving our businesses. So if you are putting up better listings, now, than you did nine months ago, or six months ago, you can go back and do that.
Ryan:
But if you think that just taking it down and putting the same thing back up is super successful, I would counter by just putting up a quality listing. First, use the tools offered like offers to likers. There’s one strategy that I didn’t mention that we really, really like specifically on Poshmark. So what’s really great about offers to likers on Poshmark is it’s only a 24-hour offer. So you create that sense of urgency. Yeah. And then you’re, you can’t send the same exact offer to the same exact buyer. Again, you can send a better offer. It has to be at least 10%, a little bit later on the reason we don’t de-list and re-list and all that is as you’re sharing your listings every single day, and you’re bringing on new likers, I can send the same exact offer the next week and all the new likers are gonna get it. And it, and it converts where I’m not gonna miss out on money if I had lowered it or, you know, take the listing down if that makes sense.
Clara:
Yeah. It completely makes sense. Especially with the likes, you know, and the, and the way, you know, that Poshmark practices social commerce.
Doug:
It’s interesting to me, you’ve obviously grown this business and I really like that. You said you wanted to do every aspect of it before you had other people that you brought on. So you’ve grown the business, you’re successful, but we also know that an important part of your story is work-life balance. So how do you maintain that? Why is that important? And especially with a new baby, how do you maintain the I think you have an example today…
Clara:
<Laugh>
Ryan:
Oh yeah, yeah. Perfect example. I guess the best way for me to respond to this is to understand what our priorities are first and our priorities are our mental, our physical health, and the people that we love and care about that are closest to us. And that dictates the decisions that we make. A pair of shoes is not more important than, you know, my wife’s health, my daughter’s health. Yeah. Our immediate family, our friends, like all that stuff. And so we lead with that first…then we’re very hard workers. We are very honest with ourselves. As we look at ourselves in the mirror, we’re honest with our numbers, we’re honest with what is working and what’s not. And I think it’s very easy, especially in the reselling world and seeing stuff on social media to not be honest with yourself, just to try to, you know, compete or, or whatever.
Ryan:
And so the work-life balance thing for us has always been Lindsay and I communicating with each other. Number one, are you still enjoying this? We always ask each other that. And so far, the answer is yes, number two, are we actually being successful? Are we actually paying the bills? When we first started off, the goals were like, how do we sell a pair of shoes, one pair of shoes. And then we’re like, how do we multiply this? Now our efforts, although they’re broken down into daily goals, are how do we pay off the house in three years instead of 30, we’ve already paid off all the cars. How do we set ourselves up every month to maybe want to take the next month off. Yeah. So that dictates what that work-life balance is. Then, of course, we talked about it a little bit earlier.
Ryan:
I think there’s one quote that says if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. Lindsay and I are an amazing team. And to this day, if, if our entire team tomorrow was just like, Hey, you know what? It’s not working out for us. Lindsay and I are cleaning shoes. We’re photographing shoes, we’re listing shoes. But we pour into the people that we hire so that they feel good about working with us, because if they feel good about working with us if they’re making a good amount of money and they are helping us now, we’re really talking about a big, big business with a ton of free time. Generally speaking, it really comes down to how you lead your decisions. Yeah. If you lead with your decisions only chasing the money, like it’s real simple, just 20, 23 hours a day, go sourcing every single day.
Ryan:
You know, don’t ever eat anything healthy, you know, spend all night listing, you know, you’ll get very overtired, but then you’ll crash and burn, and then you can go back and do it again. And, and you’ll make a bunch of money, but you won’t ever have time to use it, or you won’t have people around you. And there’s everywhere from that and where we are and in between. And I think it’s really, really important to lead with the healthier version first because there’s money everywhere and there are ways to do it where you can have plenty of free time.
Clara:
Absolutely. You’re very strategic Ryan, very. I can tell you got you’re very, you follow a process. You don’t gamble on your decisions. Let’s put it like that. Right, right. How you said that, why don’t you sell on eBay? Okay. Why is that please?
Ryan:
Mental, mental, real estate for us, I’ve answered this question so many times, and I love when people ask. So the first thing I always say is by no means do Lindsay and I, are we saying that you cannot build a monster shoe reselling business on eBay? You absolutely can. We used to use eBay. Now, the reason we specifically don’t use eBay number one, logistically, it’s, that it’s a lot harder to use multiple marketplaces when one of them is eBay. It’s a lot easier to run a multiple marketplaces reselling business when one of those marketplaces is not eBay, just through experience. Then what we would say is it’s just personal preference. Like we’ve tried dozens of different marketplaces. Earlier on the chatter was you can’t build a big business off of eBay. And so what we were, we were just listening, listening to the people that were much bigger than us at the time and saying, okay, like you’re telling us, you’ve put in the experience, we trust you.
Ryan:
And so we were on eBay and then we started running into situations where we were just getting really frustrated with stuff. And I don’t wanna sit here and, and bash eBay, but the way we function as resellers, we just couldn’t figure out how to get through those hurdles. And then what we were getting, the feedback we were getting was, it’s just part of the business. Yeah. We said, okay, we respect that. If that’s part of the business, let’s go build a monster business elsewhere. We believed in ourselves and we started really hunting down people that were doing well on other marketplaces and learning from them. And then we just poured into every single day, the pros and cons and, and being honest with our business, meaning the numbers and saying, if today, if we weren’t profitable on Poshmark like we wouldn’t use it. If we weren’t profitable on Facebook Marketplace, we wouldn’t use it. We’re not romantic to any marketplace. But I think if you’re listening to this, you don’t have to be forced to use any specific marketplace. And so for us eBay, it’s not off the table forever. Do you know what I mean? We have really good friends that crush on eBay and we love it. But just for us, it’s, it’s not something that worked for us.
Doug:
Let’s shift for a moment to talking about multiple platforms to cross listing. So you’ve used other cross listing platforms. And how, how was that experience across the board for you?
Ryan:
We’ve had good and bad. I think that there are understandably a lot of options that are starting to pop up because listing and cross listing is something that’s, it’s, it’s one of the parts of the business that’s harder to like really enjoy <laugh> you, we all, that’s all true. We all love to go treasure hunting. We all love, obviously, when we’re shipping out sales and all that stuff, but on the top type, the top 10 list of things that are absolutely crucial listing being one of them, it’s not super exciting and fun. Now you absolutely have to do it. You have to, if you wanna use multiple marketplaces looking into a company that helps you do that is something that Lindsay and I mulled over for a long time. And then just like everything else I’ve talked about, we said, all right, let’s, let’s find one that works for us that we trust. And that could free up some time for us because we were spending a lot of labor hours, you know we were doing everything on our phone and doing that. And so we used some other services and they would start out okay. And we’d kind of figure it out and then it would be good for a little while, and then it wasn’t good. And we started realizing that we were spending more time using these other services, correcting our listings, or, you know, going back and being like, oh, wait, this is all messed up. Like, let’s fix it. Yeah. It was taking us more time to do that and then actually put up the listings ourselves. So obviously logistically that doesn’t make sense. And then of course we were introduced to List Perfectly and got excited about what we were hearing from other people.
Ryan:
I mean, I think word of mouth, obviously, it’s, it’s not anything new, but we were starting to see some people that we trusted, you know, use it. And we’re big believers in reaching out to people that we trust and, and seeing what’s going on and then mulling it over logically thinking through all the pros and cons and then what we call taking 10 at bats and trying it and pouring ourselves into it. And so we did that X amount of months ago with List Perfectly and right off the bat, obviously, the pricing was way better, you know, so, you know, from the P and L standpoint, like that made a lot of sense. And then the service was a lot better. And then the clincher for us was the idea that List Perfectly follows all the rules. And I, I know that sounds silly if you’re listening to this, like not all the services follow all the rules.
Ryan:
And we found that out the hard way. We thought they were following all the rules. And then all of a sudden, you know, these red flags started coming up and then the truth came out that it wasn’t. So again, the thing I’ll end with is List Perfectly follows all the rules. It was one of the clinchers for us. And then obviously it’s a great product that we’ve been using for, you know, months now and saves us a tremendous amount of time. Very, very affordable, the most important thing is it allows us to save a tremendous amount of time while still effectively doing something that’s so important to our business.
Clara:
If you have to say, you know, since we’re talking about List Perfectly, let me ask you a question. What would you say is one of your favorite features of List Perfectly?
Ryan:
Well, I’m a big, no ceilings guy. I like when there’s no roof, no full pot…, Like there, there’s always stuff evolving. I don’t think it’s good to spread yourself too thin, but I do like the idea of, are we ever gonna grow outta this? And so like, if I back way up like Lindsay and I are never gonna grow out of reselling shoes like there’s never gonna not be shoes for us to resell. There’s not gonna be people buying more shoes. So like our business is built around that and we enjoy shoes. Then when it comes to List Perfectly, there are so many different ways that you can use it based on how you function as a reseller. And that opened up some doors for us. It wasn’t like, here’s a box you gotta come into here and you gotta be like this in this small little box.
Ryan:
And so it’s allowed us to use List Perfectly in, in a creative way, but also with respect to how we wanna use it. Yeah. Rather than renegotiating all parts of our business to fit into a box that, as we’ve seen in the past, like trying to fit into that box, all of a sudden it doesn’t work and it addresses the business. So my favorite part of List Perfectly, there are multiple ways that you can effectively use it, whether you wanna obviously load all your listings straight in, whether you’ve got a bunch of listings on a marketplace and you want to convert those over or whether you want to take things even further. I know there’s stuff in the pipeline about, you know, more growth in the future too, but I like the no ceilings aspect of it.
Clara:
Great answer. I love it. Thank you for sharing that, you know, that’s certain, certainly our vision and mission. We understood, you know, where List Perfectly was going very well back three years ago. And we literally, yes, we do practice exactly what you said. <Laugh> how do you incorporate List Perfectly into your business?
Ryan:
Well, so when we first started using List Perfectly we already had a bunch of listing things up. And so to kind of test things out, we were taking listings from one marketplace and then using List Perfectly to put them on to other marketplaces. That went really well. We then started using our team to help us kind of load listings in, and then we would manage where the listings would go. Right. And then as we grow, the goal always is to how do we yeah, do what we’re doing, but kind of Lindsay and I step away from the business. And so we’re working now, the future looks like we’re working now on testing, having some of our team members log in and do the listings for us and kind of like upload and kind of manage it from there. Now that comes with, you gotta build trust with the people that you’re letting log to your account.
Ryan:
So yeah, you know, our team members right now are local here in Maine. And so we’re working with them, showing them what’s crazy is, and it’s okay that this happens once, once people get the bug, right, they say, wow, you know, List Perfectly makes this so easy. Then they say, I’m just gonna go do my own business. And then they go sign up, they sign up with List Perfectly and they start doing their business. And that, again, Lindsay and I completely understand when we’re showing all parts of our business, that people are gonna get pumped and then, and go on and, and build their own business. And we support that. But it’s pretty interesting because of how easy it is to do what normally would be a very difficult thing in terms of running a multiple marketplace business. List Perfectly does make that very easy.
Clara:
Oh, thank you, Ryan. Do you use sharing bots for Poshmark that require so much sharing to organically promote listings? Or do you, how do you do these?
Ryan:
Yeah. So the quick answer is no, we don’t use any bots. I’m gonna share a Facebook Marketplace story that will answer your Poshmark question. When we first started in 2017, we were only using Facebook Marketplace. We were posting on local groups on Facebook Marketplace, like buy and sell groups. Yeah. And I did not know the rules of the groups. And so we weren’t doing anything malicious. We were just listing a lot of shoes. Like we would go to the bins, we would clean the shoes and then we would list them. And so I still, I was listing, you know, 15, 20, 20, 5, 30, 50 pairs of shoes sometimes. And then all of a sudden I was getting kicked out of all these Facebook groups, the place we were selling kicked me off because I was breaking the rules. I didn’t know that in some groups, there was a quantity limit.
Ryan:
Like some groups you could only list, you could only list like five pairs, five things a day or 10 things a day. Now, the reason I mentioned that is because I wasn’t following the rules on Facebook Marketplace. Our business was taken away from us. Like they were like, you can’t sell here. Now, of course, anyone listening to this would be like, oh, just go sell somewhere else. But we realized very, very early on that we’re always gonna follow the rules on every single marketplace so that we are always in control of our business. We’re never gonna wake up some morning and all of our hard work is gone, and the marketplace says, now, you, you can’t use us anymore cuz you’re breaking the rules. So now with the Poshmark bot question, very simply automation and bots are not allowed on Poshmark. It’s very clear.
Ryan:
Now there are lots of people that use bots and they don’t ever get caught. It’s like the person who steals a candy bar from the grocery store, they’re not gonna catch everyone. But imagine how much that stinks. When as a grown adult, you get caught stealing a candy bar. Like not, everyone’s gonna get kicked off Poshmark, but every single week we get DMs saying, Hey, you guys sell a lot on Poshmark. I woke up and all my listings were gone. And I, the first thing we say is like, are you using bots? And they’re like, oh yeah, because it was so much, it was so inexpensive. And we just simply say, that’s such a bummer. You’re breaking the rules. So when you break the rules, there are consequences. So, the long-winded answer is no, we don’t use a bot. It is more laboresque to share our listings every single day. Yeah. And then eventually, you know, we’ve connected with a virtual assistant that helps us. It’s another human being that helps us do some sharing, which is allowed. And that’s how we’ve grown our business. And I hope people that are listening to this like I’m not sitting here saying that the police are gonna come get you. But I think what’s super important is if you wanna be successful long-term, just follow all the rules and you’re in complete control of your business.
Clara:
Well said.
Doug:
You’ve got all this business wisdom that you’ve built up over experience. And you do share this with other sellers and you, and so part of that is on your YouTube channel. So a very active YouTube channel. What can sellers expect to find at your RNZY YouTube channel?
Ryan:
Yeah, it’s a really good question. So we approach our social media, you know, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, and we use it more as a tool to help us save time in connecting with other resellers. And so for example, if one of the biggest questions we get is like, what are those boxes that you’re using to ship shoes? Or what do you know, where do you get your shoe shelving? For maybe a year and a half, two years we were answering every question. And then eventually we said, why don’t we just create a YouTube video? And then when the question comes in 12 times every day, we just send them the video. Yeah. And like it’s so much easier. So if you go to our YouTube channel, first of all, you’re gonna see absolutely everything that we do in our business.
Ryan:
100% where we get our shoes, how we clean the shoes. Wow. What brands we’re picking up, where we sell them strategy with each marketplace, obviously how we ship the shoes, how we handle questions that come in about the shoes, how to save time in customer service by, you know, we have a whole list of answers to common questions. And so when the question comes in, we just copy and paste the answer. That’s what you’re gonna see on our social media. Now we still get hundreds of DMs every day and we still get lots of YouTube comments and we love it because that’s how we learned. Yeah. So don’t, don’t be afraid to ask us any questions, but if you’re really gung ho we haven’t left anything out. It’s like all free information. There’s no secret. There’s no like we don’t tell you. We go to all the Savers around Boston and then go to New Hampshire. Like we go to all the Savers in Boston. Like we go to all the Goodwills in Maine. Like we go to all these places and then we see people there and they’re like, oh my gosh, you are here. You’re told us where to go and you’re here. And then we split up the shoes cuz we’re there’s enough for everyone. <Laugh>. So again, the long winded answer is like, you’re gonna see exactly a very honest step-by-step exactly what we do. And the reason we do that is cuz that’s how we learned. And so we want to pour back into the reselling community.
Doug:
And you’re an awesome part of the community. It’s really appreciated.
Ryan:
Appreciate that.
Clara:
That’s right. So what about the RNZY podcast and are there gonna be more episodes?
Ryan:
Yeah, so again, that was the same, our same goal with the podcast was not everyone is on YouTube, obviously. There are lots of people on YouTube, not everyone is on Instagram. Is there a way we can connect with people who just wanna listen in the car and that type of thing? Yeah. Now the reason we haven’t done any of the podcasts as much is because when Lindsay and I were both going sourcing down in Boston, we would do it on the way we, as we were driving two or three hours down to Boston, we would do the podcast. Then I’ve been doing the sourcing because of our beautiful daughter. She’s, you know, seven months old now, but so I’ve been doing most and all of the sourcing. So I can’t, I can’t do a podcast while driving, I guess I could do it, but like I wanna be safe and not, you know, record.
Ryan:
And it’s, it’s one of those things. Now, back to what I said earlier, where we lead with, you know, mental and physical health first, sometimes we just don’t have enough mental, real estate to like create another YouTube video or to do another podcast or to do it. And, then we just don’t do it. Like that’s important to us is like to be able to be fresh and, and enjoy the process rather than say, oh my gosh, I gotta put out another, you know, podcast. Because we don’t do YouTube for money. We don’t do podcasts for money like pennies trickle in from that. Yeah. You know, less than a hundred bucks a month across all, you know, marketplaces. But more importantly, it saves us a tremendous amount of time to exchange answers to the questions when people are inquiring.
Clara:
Oh, that’s amazing.
Doug:
So over the last, I guess a year or so, a lot of live selling has come into focus. So you’re selling on Whatnot now. So I’m just curious, how’s that going? How’s that been for you and what kind of brought you over there?
Ryan:
It’s going great. We’ve done two live auctions. We have another one this evening. Okay. We’re really excited. It’s crazy because five years ago, Lindsay and I would create videos on Facebook Marketplace and we’d have a bunch of shoes behind us. And we would say, Hey guys, we got a bunch of shoes for sale. And we had, at that time we had created, we had tested, creating our own website. And so we were essentially like every pair back then was only $25. And so we were saying, Hey, we’ve got all these shoes, let us know what you want. And you know, here’s our website and you can do all this stuff. We were essentially doing the Whatnot thing where we live, and then we’re directing people to the store now, Whatnot. Again, we’re very new to it.
Ryan:
We’re less than a month into it, but it’s been great. We enjoy interacting with people. It’s because the basics are the same, right? Like you still have to put up a quality listing. You still have to, you know, write a good description. You still have to be very honest with what you’re selling. It makes no sense to like, I mean, obviously cuz you’re on video, but like it makes no sense to hide blemishes or like, you know, try to sell stuff where they won’t see the rips or tears like that doesn’t make any sense. But more importantly, you can interact with the people that are purchasing from you. And it’s very I’ve used the word hyper where like stuff either doesn’t sell or sells right away. And so there’s just a different dynamic to it.
Ryan:
I think just like any marketplace there are people that are absolutely abusing it right now. And I think there are people that are doing really, really great things. And I also think there are people not doing very good things. And so we’re navigating with honesty and really trying to figure out, even if it’s gonna be a long-term play for us or not like we’re taking our 10 at-bats with Whatnot, but it certainly plays to what we enjoy, which is, you know, here are the things that we’ve poured ourselves into. You know, we went out, we drove around New England, we found all these great shoes. We start all our auctions at $1. So which means if we could sell a pair for a dollar or it could go up the market decides but we really like saying like, here’s what we have and then of course shipping it. And then our first two auctions, we’re already getting dozens and dozens of people that are saying, oh my gosh, I can’t believe I got these shoes. When’s your next auction? So it’s gone well so far.
Doug:
Awesome. Congrats on that. That’s cool.
Ryan:
Thank you.
Clara:
Indeed. Indeed. What’s next for RNZY? What’s coming next? What do you see your, where, what are your dreams or where do you see your business? That is you wear your, what is it you wear on your sleeve?
Ryan:
Your heart…
New Speaker:
Your heart, your soul. Yeah. So where do you see RNZY going?
Ryan:
Yeah, so we wanna grow our personal shoe reselling business to a number that we have in mind that produces, you know, X amount of profit per month consistently. And we want to do that with a really solid team that is doing it. So right now we do have a team that sources for us, we do have a team that cleans the shoes for us. You know, we’re still doing the listing and using List Perfectly to help us cross list across the marketplaces. We’re, we’re navigating those, but we’re real. We are really close about almost being kind of hands off. And then once that is going and it’s, you know, a train that’s going down the track and, and consistently producing what we want it to do.
Ryan:
We’ve started some other adventures on the side. We launched an equity fund in January where we actually invest in resellers. They have to be shoe resellers and we give them a buying budget. We invest in them financially. We invest in them with resources. We have a tax professional on hand that helps them with their taxes at no charge for them. And it’s called the Sweat Equity Fund because all you have to do is bring your sweat equity, we’ll take care, we’ll take care of the money. We’ll take care of building a sourcing route in your area. We’ll take care of everything. Meaning we’ll work with you to figure out what works best for you. And then what happens is we with the equity fund, we walk through the, we walk them through 1000 pairs sold. And then when they finish their 1000 pairs sold, they become a partner in the Sweat Equity Fund. And the equity fund actually invests in them every month for two years to help them build out their teams and they’re off and running.
Ryan:
And so the reason I even bring that up, I hope it didn’t come across as a self-promotion is like, it has to, it has to do exactly with shoes. And, and the only thing that we know this isn’t like, we’ll teach you how to resell jeans. This isn’t like, we’ll teach you how to sell VCRs. We’re very passionate. We’ve, we’ve invested in seven resellers so far from all parts of the country. One of the resellers we invest in has already turned our thousand dollars investment into over $40,000 in sales. <Laugh>, you know, very, very quickly and they’re becoming partners. So that is something that we’re gonna lean into as well. Because we’re very passionate about it. It’s everything that’s involved. It is what we do on a daily basis. So we’re still gonna have our reselling business. And we really like the equity fund.
Ryan:
We like building other leaders in the shoe reselling category with the underlying theme that like, there’s so much opportunity like Lindsay and I, for five years to exhaustion have been telling everyone exactly where we go, all the brands, what we’re using for tools. Like we, we have not left anything out and we still can go out and source great inventory. And, and I think I, we got through the pandemic. Like I don’t, yeah. I don’t think there’s gonna be anything worse than a pandemic hopefully. And, and we continue to grow. And so the reason I say that is like, it feels good to connect with other people, all that see that. And then holy smokes, they start saying, you know, this is crazy. What’s possible just by selling shoes. And then it opens up so many doors to build relationships with people. So our personal reselling business isn’t going anywhere.
Ryan:
We love the equity fund, but we’re also starting to really plan some trips. We got a big trip in January, that’s gonna be a month long. We’ve got a couple of shorter trips before that. So we’re gonna start bouncing around, you know, the world with our daughter and we’re gonna be scooping up some real estate as well because they’re not making any more real estate, so we wanna buy some land. You know, we wanna build second, third, fourth homes all around the world. So that’s like the long, long way down the road.
Speaker 4:
I love it. Thank you for sharing. I love it.
Doug:
This has come up over the course of the conversation. So I’m super interested. You both have very different backgrounds. And then you came into selling online and you’ve built this all up. Where did this business savviness come from?
Ryan:
Well, I appreciate you using those words. I don’t by any means think I am savvy. I mean, I’ll be very clear, like Lindsay runs this whole show. She’s the brains behind the operation. I’m the guy who is like the crazy squirrel. Who’s throwing, throwing stuff. You know, I’m coming up with all these ideas and, and she’s saying, all right, well, nine and a half of those are very bad ideas, but like, I think you’re onto something with this little half idea over here. And I, I think the, and again, I appreciate using the word savvy. I think really what it comes down to is what I’ve been saying. Like this, this honesty with the reality of the situation. I think that’s very difficult because we all wanna be super successful. And there’s been plenty of times where we wish we were doing better, but we weren’t.
Ryan:
And so if you navigate your decisions based on something that’s not real and not actually happening, it’s very hard to build some traction. If you look yourself in the mirror and say, all right, I’m not selling X, Y, and Z, or I’m not selling as much as I’d like. And I guess here’s something that I haven’t mentioned. And if you take 100% accountability that you can control it. Like no other reseller is gonna affect our business. No other manager of a thrift is gonna affect our business. The pricing of the thrift is not gonna affect our business. I know that sounds crazy. Like we leave the high priced shoes at the thrift. <Laugh> like, doesn’t mean you buy shoes for $50 in the thrift. And believe me, there’s managers that are like, they don’t like resellers, but 99% of the people love resellers that come in and buy lots of stuff.
Ryan:
The savviness comes from just being honest with ourselves. And then coming up with both a short and long term game plan that we execute on, what we can actually do. It doesn’t make sense for me to say, all right. Our goal is to sell a thousand pairs of shoes like today. If I can’t go out and source a thousand pairs of shoes, I’m obviously not going to be able to sell a thousand pairs of shoes. So that non-reality doesn’t make sense. But if my goal is like, I wanna sell a thousand pairs of shoes a day, all right, how can I build a sourcing route that allows me to bring in a thousand? And then you start Googling thrifts around New England, and then you start Googling, what are the ones closest to me? And then even more you put in the sweat equity, because you gotta like go to the thrift and see if they’re even worth going to, if you’re listening to this, by no means, is it like you’re born with it by no means it just comes down to being honest with yourself and taking accountability for your actions. And then as we always say, pouring gas on what’s working. And literally this is the hardest part, stop being romantic to what is not working. There’s some shoes that I wish sold <laugh>, but they just are not profitable. So like, you don’t source and bring those into your business.
Doug:
We wish more sellers did think like that. Or more platforms or more tools, or…
Ryan:
Yeah, it’s difficult because in the reselling world, it’s very easy to blame other things and have it almost make sense. Right? Like what I just said, if a manager, this has happened to us, managers have seen us coming and they know we’re resellers. We’re always very kind to everyone. We don’t ask for any additional discounts, but for whatever reason, there’s been times where they’ve seen us coming and they’ve run and increased the price of the shoes right there. <Laugh> right. So like, I could, I could have sat back and been like this, manager’s messing up my business and like, how am I supposed to be successful if they literally see me walking into the parking lot with my Ikea bag. And I see ’em running over and they change the price and they tell me they just changed the price, cuz they saw me coming in there and they think that because I’m a reseller, I should pay more. But it’s very simple. I just take a deep breath and I say, man, I’ll see you next week. We will check the prices next week. And I go to the next thrift. Like that little moment is what changes people, right? Like you can either go into the rabbit hole of being like, oh, I’m never gonna be successful because managers are doing this and the prices are going up or you can be like onto the next thrift.
Doug:
And you talked about too also, you know, not taking the easy way out cuz that’s easy. But you know, the example you just gave that store loses the sale altogether. Didn’t they didn’t, they wanna make a sale, don’t you know?
Ryan:
Yeah. And they’re resellers. I lead with like, I try to lead with empathy, right? Like I understand. Yeah. Why do thrift prices go up and down? I understand because they’ve got overhead, they’ve got employees. There’s like, you know, employees saying, I wanna make more money there’s you know, all this stuff. And so instead of getting frustrated and mad, if you just try to understand that side of it and then navigate how you can be part of the solution. Like for example, there are some pairs where I will pay up for where it’s not fun to pay 50 bucks for a pair. But if they’re like almost brand new steel toe Thoroughgood boots, you know what I mean? Like again, it’s, it’s not the greatest feeling, even though they got ’em for free, like why are you pricing ’em for $50? Like, okay.
Ryan:
But if you, if you see a pair of very used Nikes and you see me coming and you put a $50 price tag on that, just cuz I’m coming in the door, <laugh> as you said, Doug, that logic is very short term thinking. You know, imagine if a restaurant owner, you know, saw a whole crowd of very hungry people that come in all the time, saw them coming in and said, Hey, the buffet is a hundred bucks now instead of $9.99, like that would make no sense. But if the buffet is like, you know, hurting and they need to like it, they wanna pay their employees more. If the buffet is now $30, like I understand, I completely understand I’m either gonna go there or, or I’m not gonna complain and I’ll go to the other buffet.
Ryan:
Yeah. It’s the flywheel effect, right? Like if you can get people in your flywheel for the right reasons, it makes a ton of sense. Like again, the reason we, when we first started, every pair was $25 was that’s easy, yes. It’s not like we really need to negotiate. Like, it’s just, do I want the shoes or not? Now that was on Facebook Marketplace, local delivery. Like there are no fees involved. There are no shipping costs like all that, but very early on, people were just waiting for us to list shoes because they’re like, your price is great. I love what you’re doing, game on. And so if you can get people in your flywheel, now you can do that on Poshmark. You can do that on Facebook Marketplace shipping, which we do now. That’s what you lead with. I mean, that’s the Amazon effect as well.
Ryan:
Like if you get people in and you provide them so much value, almost doesn’t make sense to shop anywhere else. There are just so many amazing people in the community that when you get like a knucklehead that comes in, it’s like easy, to brush them aside and, and focus on, all the positivity that’s going on. Or, I mean, I guess there are some people that go down that rabbit hole of, of negativity, but like, there’s just so many people that we’ve seen and that we look up to that are, are doing big things in the reselling community that is pouring back into it, which is the same mentality that we have. Like, how can we pour into this so that it just clicks for someone and then you become friends and now you’re growing alongside each other, rather than, I’m not gonna tell anyone where we source. I’m not gonna tell anyone. Right. Yeah. The type of brands that we, you know what I mean? It doesn’t that’s not the long-term play.
Clara:
Nope.
Doug:
Yeah, exactly.
Ryan:
We’re in the used shoe game. So like, if you’re in the hyped up shoe game, there’s, it’s, it’s a lot harder to source those things. So that’s where I understand where if people start to get you know, more secretive about where they’re getting their shoes and stuff then I get it. I still think there’s enough, but…
Doug:
Yeah.
Clara:
Thank you. I agree with you. I still think there’s enough.
Ryan:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There’s still plenty. You go to a sneaker con, you meet people you know, you connect with a marketplace that’s up and coming and it just opens up doors. And if you, if you’re a good person, it’ll open up good doors. If you’re secretive and you take advantage of things, like all that does is, is welcome in people who are gonna be secretive with you and take advantage of you.
Clara:
Oh, thank you. That’s exactly the people you’re gonna get.
Ryan:
Exactly. Hundred percent.
Doug:
So I have a question that I throw in and I really love this question. So can you give me three adjectives that describe you and your business?
Ryan:
Yeah. honest, adaptive and motivated. Honest, adaptive and motivated. Cause you said three words. I was gonna say no excuses, but that’s like two words. <Laugh> you know, we’re…
Doug:
There’s a little flexibility…
Ryan:
Yeah. Yeah. So we’re, I guess the fourth would be no excuses. We’re very big believers in there’s like, I know this is gonna sound corny. Like anything is possible, right? Like, and I, I always want, can I, can I share a quick story with that? It sounds very like kumbaya and like, Hey, let’s download a YouTube video. That’s motivational. And everyone says no excuses and you can go do it. <Laugh> the reason, the reason we’re so bullish on that is like, when we were first off on Facebook Marketplace, only local deliveries, right? Yeah. You post a shoe. Someone within X amount of miles says, I want this shoe. You have to get in your car, you drive, you meet them at the police station, you meet ’em at the grocery store. You meet ’em at the post office, whatever. Boom. There are so many, only so many times you can do that in a day. Right?
Ryan:
And so we could have been like, oh, that’s all. That’s all we can do. But what we did is we started building out a team all-around Maine where every morning we’d have a text list, we’d text them photos of the shoes. Then they would list on all their local buy and sell marketplaces all the same shoes. And then, we would have a control center. This one girl who had a Google sheet and whoever got back to her first to set up the delivery would earn the sale. They didn’t have to go anywhere. Lindsay and I would fill the car with all the shoes and we would just go around delivering. So we didn’t have to list anything. We didn’t have to like to communicate. We diversified all the stuff that was causing us to not be able to do more deliveries.
Ryan:
What would happen is we’d sell a pair for $25. We’d give that person five bucks. Yeah. The pair cost us $10. We would profit $10. Now everyone’s gonna hear this and say, what about gas? What about whatever? We were pulling up to neighborhoods and selling dozens of shoes out of our car because we would coordinate everything to be at once. The people that were setting up all the deliveries, making $5 a sale were making six to 800 bucks a month. Now again, I share that story, that’s what we mean by no excuses. We don’t, you know, you gotta be creative in how you build your business sometimes instead of just saying, oh, I’m only one person and we’re only two people or I can’t do that. Get real creative, following all the rules, but get real creative. And like, we haven’t even, we haven’t even touched the potential of used shoes and we’ve sold over 27,000 pairs. Like, yeah. Wow. It’s gonna be crazy what happens in the next year.
Clara:
Can’t wait, can’t wait to see where, where your journey goes. It’s very exciting. A reselling journey. Ryan, before we wrap this up and we say, goodbye, anything else you’d like to add to the audience?
Ryan:
I think we covered a lot. I think it boils down to simple concepts, right? Like if you wanna do this, I think, you know, be a full-time reseller or shoe seller. It’s absolutely doable. There are people making way, way more money than us. But I think what it boils down to is figuring out what works best for you is the most important, rather than like you take pieces of everyone that’s around you. And I think that’s great to learn from other people, but then you never have to do anything you don’t want to do. There are literally people that never leave their house. They sit at home, they source online, it gets dropped off at their house. They list it. And then the post office comes and picks it up. Like they, they never have to get outta sweatpants ever.
Ryan:
<Laugh> like, like, so like if you don’t wanna drive around New England like we do picking up all these shoes, you don’t have to, if you wanna get out there on a treasure hunt, you absolutely can. If you don’t like to do all the listing and cross listing List Perfectly is a game-changer. It’s been a game-changer for us. If you the biggest thing again, I could go on forever instead of creating your own roadblocks, just because you don’t know how to get there doesn’t mean you can’t get there. You just gotta find people that are kind of where you wanna be. And then ask a ton of questions. A lot of people might not answer your questions, but some of them will. And then you build this momentum and it’s such a cool feeling to have 100% control of your life financially in the reselling world where people think that you don’t have control. Like we make, we make as much money as our sweat equity as, as the sweat equity that we put in period. Right. And we’re just getting started and we’re, we’re really excited. So that’s the message I guess that I would leave with people. If you have any questions, we’re an open book, you know, you can reach out to us through YouTube or Instagram and, and we’re, we’ll, we’ll answer any questions that you have.
Doug:
Yeah. And we’ll include all your links in the show notes. And anything else you want us to include, but thanks, Ryan. We’ve been joined by RNZY, Ryan from RNZY and this was a really awesome motivational talk. And I love, you know, and I could almost have predicted your three adjectives. I was <laugh> I knew you were so honest and just, I love that. And I love your approach and I love that you are so community-oriented and we always love sellers that do it for free. It’s like, we’re doing it. We’re gonna show you how to do it. Here’s how we do it. And you take what you know, take what you want out of it.
Ryan:
The cherry on top of that is why we do it for free, right. There’s no, because there’s, there’s a lot of sharks in the pond that will say, Hey, Hey, here’s all the information, except the most important. And then you just gotta buy my course. And like, again, <laugh>, you’re making courses like do your thing. I get it. But we learned from asking questions on Instagram and YouTube. Yeah. So it makes no sense, it makes no sense for us to then turn around and say, Hey, we’re gonna charge you for the information. So yeah, it doesn’t come from any other place than we’re grateful for the people that answer our questions. So we’re happy to pour back into people that have questions themselves.
Doug:
Awesome. Well, yeah, thanks very much. It was a really great chat.
Ryan:
Thank you, thank you both for allowing us to come on. I really appreciate it.
Clara:
Thank you, Ryan.
Doug:
Thank you for joining us on The Seller Community Podcast from List Perfectly. You can find us at thesellercommunitypodcast.com. You can leave a message or ask a question at anchor.fm/sellercommunitypodcast. You can email us at podcast@listperfectly.com. Post a question in the List Perfectly Facebook group at facebook.com/groups/listperfectly. You can listen to The Seller Community Podcast anywhere you listen to podcasts and be sure and subscribe, tell your friends, and if you’re on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, please leave us a review on Instagram and TikTok. You can find @snoop.dougie and of course, follow @listperfectly. And you can always use our promo code podcast. That’S P O D C A S T for 30% off your first month of List Perfectly or 30% off your first month of upgrading your plan. Thanks for listening. And we will see you next time.