I am drowning in clothing ....

I am drowning in clothing .....   Children's clothing - and I have no children.

In my last post, you saw how I had snaffled a large amount of clothing for a good price.
I've gone through them all, and given them the sniff test and the eyeball test.    Then I have a very small pile of clothes to clean - only about 8 items.   Normally, only about 25% (at the very most) of the clothes I get from op shops need cleaning.  Most people (like me) always clean their clothes before donating.  It saves me a lot of time and effort.

I have a secret to preparing the clothes for sale.    They end up white where they're supposed to be ...  and stain-free, smelling nice, and ironed so flat you could skate on them.  They're like something from a laundry detergent ad.

This here, is my iron.

And here is my clothes line...

Oops, I forgot to mention, I don't have an iron, or an ironing board - and I've never used my clothesline, because I would have to battle weeds and ant nests to get to it.

But I have a secret to getting my clothes especially clean and ironed - that require me NOT needing these things.  

Here is my big secret:

Yep - that's my Mum.  She is a freak about ironing!  When I was a kid she ironed all day.  I'm one of four children so there was lots of clothing to keep her going - she even ironed socks and undies and would have ironed me if I had sat still long enough.

I have lunch with Mum & Dad every Saturday. One of the questions my Mum always asks is "Do you have any clothes for me?"  She grabs that bag of clothes with glee.   She craves it - she is salivating for those dirty clothes.  The bigger the stain, the better - she wants them to be nasty so she can battle them.  The next week she shows me the spotless item and talks about how she soaked it in napisan and did some voodoo stuff on it, then ironed the crap out of it and - there they are - the magical clean clothes.    What would I do without her?  She's awesome.  :-)

Yes, I did think for many years as a child that I had been adopted, and this is only one of the many many reasons why.


This is the bottom of my wardrobe.   This is all kids clothes for Ebay, and this is only one side of my robe:

I have them all in plastic bags sorted by Size and Boy/Girl clothes:

Yep, I've definitely got enough Size 1 Girl's clothes to put a Bulk Lot on ebay - must pull my finger out.   I would love to store the clothes in plastic containers, but basically they are either so large they won't fit in the wardrobe, or so small they don't hold enough of the clothes to separate the sizes.

I am gradually moving to these cute little stripey bags with the zipper on the top:

To keep a track of all these little people clothes that have invaded my house, I keep a notebook with tabs for size and Boy/Girl.  I add the new clothes as they come in, and note any marks or things that need to be mentioned in the listing.

I use Auctiva for my listings, and I keep an updated draft for each size boy/girl clothing listing and update them every week.     Then when there's a lot ready to go, all I need to do is take the photos and we're done.

Here's one of my current listings :
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=120844030162&ssPageName=STRK:MESE:IT


This clothing stuff is all new to me.   I got interested in branching out into other things by my lovely, friendly, and very helpful mates on Ebay Underground.    They were buying interesting clothes (and other things) at low prices, and selling them for a good profit.       I got interested - I started looking at clothes in my op shops.     I wanted to get some clothes and have them sit in my store for 5 cents a pop until someone snaffled them up for a great price.

Then I hit a brick wall.  I realised that though the dream was great,  Ebay Australia is a completely different animal to Ebay USA or Canada.

I have a basic store - I pay $19.95 a month.

For this I can list books, CDs, Videos and DVDs for 5 cents each.  These are my specialties - these are my bread and butter.   For clothes or anything else I would have to pay a whopping  40 cents per Buy It now Listing.

Whoaahhhhh!  That's a big sucking hole in my profits there.   What if I upgraded my store to the next level up - for a mere $99.95  for a Featured Store.  What savings will I make now in fees?  Lots surely???

Bwahahahahahhahahahhhhaaaa!!!  Sorry, I just choked a bit then.

Wow - then I only have to pay 30 cents per listing.   Ummm - no thanks.

But I mean - what the hell?  Are those fees an incentive to pay nearly $100 per month just to have a store.  Really?   Are there monkeys running Ebay Australia?   (Actually monkeys would probably do a better job - cudos to those monkeys).

That throws the clothing range sold as single items out of my ball park.   I truly never see anything special that I can buy at a decent price here - and certainly never anything new with tag.   My cash for ebay stock is dismally small.   With all I'm learning at Ebay Underground, I'm getting better, but I'm still doing baby-steps.

As long as my local op shop sells the cheap kiddies clothes - I'll stick with my bulk lots.  (Their adult clothes are a bit ho hum - not worth selling on their own - and I really don't want to suck up those big listing fees).  It's a lot of work to do bulk lots, but it's fun to fill a bag of clothes and make my little numbered bags sorted by size (oh dear, I'm sounding a bit anal now ...) ,    and the sale when it happens is a nice amount in my otherwise lowly-priced items.

I said in my last blog I would talk about my videos that I got on my last op shop trip and give some pointers on selling them - this will have to wait until tomorrow now, I got carried away here.   :-)

The monkeys made me do it.