Thrifthouse

Thrifthouse is a campus-based virtual marketplace for students to buy and sell unwanted goods safely and instantly to other students on their same campus.

Thrifthouse is a thrifting platform available on iOS, Android, and web that enables college students to buy and sell unwanted goods to trusted peers. The platform creates private, campus-based marketplaces that simplify delivery, try-on, and payment logistics. Additionally, by having smaller marketplaces, individual items gain more attention and are more likely to be sold.

As a whole, Thrifthouse delivers a safer, simpler, and more successful experience compared to other thrifting platforms. It enables universal, easy access to affordable clothing, goods, furniture while allowing students to more easily re-use.

Thrifthouse's mission is to promote re-use and sustainability among college students and allow all students equal access to affordable and cheaper goods.

Trends to promote sustainable clothing production and minimize "fad fashion" have become increasingly popular, as consumers are realizing the avoidable environmental impact of clothing waste. For example, in 2018 alone, the fashion industry accounted for 2.1 billion metric tons of the world's carbon emissions, making it the third-largest source of pollution globally. Despite this, studies estimate that 1/3 of all clothing items end up in the landfill less than a year after production and that 28% of consumers' closets are unworn or haven't been touched in over a year. Clearly, there is room for improvement, especially by college students who make up the majority of the consumer buying power.

At a closer look, we see that individuals between ages 16 - 24 hold the large majority of the clothing buying power. More specifically, students. So, we wanted to find a way to incentivize students to recycle their clothing in a quick, easy, and safe way. At our school, MIT, we found a clear need for our solution, with Facebook pages like "MIT Free and for Sale" having 2.2k users and email chains such as MITReuse having over 4k subscribers. However, platforms like these are often unorganized and required too much effort that students were not buying and selling on them. 

This is where Thrifthouse comes in.

Our goal was then to create a platform that made selling clothing items within campuses simple, effective, and EASY. 

Introducing, Thrifthouse: a web and mobile app that allows college students to create accounts and post clothing, furniture, etc. for purchase by their peers. Through this platform, students are able to buy/sell within their campus. Much like Facebook marketplace, the app connects a buyer and seller, then allows them to self-negotiate payment method and delivery via our chat function.

The app differentiates itself from other peer-to-peer thrifting platforms such as Depop and Poshmark by creating campus-based communities. This allows for easier buying/selling logistics (allows for in-person delivery, potential clothing try-ons) and more trustworthy user experiences (people are buying and selling to their friends, friends of friends, classmates, etc. rather than strangers). Additionally, smaller market communities prevent listings from being buried on larger platforms. Overall, these factors will incentivize higher engagement, and allow us to more easily recycle our clothes, furniture, etc., while making a couple of extra bucks.

By making it as quick and low-effort as possible, we saw students also selling smaller items such as clothes hangers and chargers that they would never take the effort to sell on other platforms.

Thrifthouse is a thrifting platform exclusively for college students. As college students ourselves, we were able to understand and recognize many of the pain points we are working to solve. With this in mind, we built our minimum viable product.

Afterward, we launched our beta platform and had ~50 MIT students use the platform, test it, and give us feedback. Once the beta was complete, we launched it exclusively to MIT. After launching, we collected multiple forms and hosted meetups for feedback from MIT students. Then over the summer, we used all of this feedback to iterate and improve the platform.

Then this Fall, we began launching to more schools beyond MIT. We went to each school to launch the app and talked to students there to listen to their feedback and impressions of the app. This was very useful to watch users sign up and begin using the app and first-hand identify any issues that arose. We closely monitored each launch and collected feedback from users as the platform was adopted. We also worked closely with a large team of students from different schools who regularly tested different growth techniques and communicated to us the needs of students at their school. We launched to both larger and smaller schools, as well as public and private schools.

Now, we feel we understand the U.S. college student audience well enough to begin automating launch and expanding to all colleges in the country.

We have a fully functioning platform available on Android, iOS, and web. We started developing Thrifthouse last December (1 year ago) and last spring (after 4 months), we beta-launched to MIT and got 30% of campus on the app within 2 weeks. The platform was not profitable last semester, but we now support in-app payments enabling us to take a small cut of each transaction. This fall we launched to UT Austin, Tufts, Brown, Stanford and Vanderbilt.

In the last couple months, our team has grown from a team of two to 4 region directors, 15 campus leads, and over 500 ambassadors. We now have over five thousand users on Thrifthouse across the six schools we have launched to, and hundreds of users still active daily. We are dedicated and eager to move and expand as quickly as possible.

The Thrifthouse app is available on iOS, Android and Web at https://thrift.house. Upon launching the app, the user is prompted to sign up or log in with their university email address. This allows us to create a private marketplace only accessible by students at a specific college. When signing up, a user must verify their college email address in order to access the marketplace. The Thrifthouse app is built with Flutter which allows us to code a cross platform application for iOS, Android and Web. We use Firebase for our backend database and authentication, and Stripe to process payments. Stripe enables us to process credit cards for purchases, and take a small portion of transactions.

4,000 -> 4,000,000 (20% of college students)

In 2022, our goal is to expand Thrifthouse to all colleges in the United States. Right now, we have been moving with a school-by-school approach to better understand the ecosystems we are serving. The main issue we have to solve here is kick-starting the marketplace at each school. In order to expand everywhere, we will create a system for automated growth. This includes using rewards for the first users to post at their school, referrals across schools, strong social media marketing, etc.

Our north star metrics are number of sales and sale volume per week. We also track weekly active users and user retention. We will measure our progress using these metrics, and measuring how many schools have established a stable user base. We use number of sales and sale volume to track sustainability and reuse enabled by Thrifthouse.

Our biggest challenge is solving the chicken-and-egg problem for the marketplace at each school. From the schools we have already launched to, we know that users love the app and continue to use it. The hard part is getting the community started without manual pushing it. We hope to solve this by creating a system for automating growth as discussed previously.

We are both college students who have experienced firsthand the struggle of buying new things every school year for classes, a new dorm, weather, etc. At the same time, it’s difficult to store things in the summer or when moving so we, as well as our friends, often have to throw away a lot. It’s been frustrating for us and our friends financially. At the same time, we know there are people throwing away the exact things we’re about to buy. The process is wasteful, time-consuming, and expensive.

To try and reduce waste, we’ve seen many friends do “dorm cleanouts” by creating powerpoints of items they want to sell and sending them out. Personally, we’ve also explored our school’s “MIT Free and For Sale” Facebook page that many students are on. However, the primary problem with these solutions is that they take a lot of effort to post, email out, connect with potential buyers, etc. So, students usually only sell large items such as fridges, couches, etc. This completely overlooks all of the smaller items that we are throwing away or want to buy. This is the main problem Thrifthouse solves that differentiates it from other thrifting platforms. By creating a platform that made it easy and instant to exchange goods (in-person, close-proximity delivery), we’ve seen students sell everything. From subleases or desks to jewelry and umbrellas, Thrifthouse has become an incredibly versatile platform.

Since, we’ve spent a lot of time launching slowly and to our own MIT campus to fully understand how we can create an app that students want to use. After three months, we beta-launched to MIT, gathered feedback on features students wanted, and spent the summer implementing their feedback. We’re also working with students across different schools to better understand a variety of communities.

n/a

The fashion industry is one of the largest contributors to carbon emissions and climate change. At the same time, purchasing new items and clothes during college while constantly moving is financially difficult for many students — especially when the lack of summer storage or downsizing/upsizing forces students to buy and get rid of items frequently.

Accordingly, Thrifthouse's central mission is to promote re-use and sustainability among college students while allowing all students equal access to affordable and cheaper goods. We are achieving this by creating a thrifting platform that allows students to buy and sell unwanted goods easier and quicker than ever before. Our quick and simple interface allows students to transact exclusively with other students on their campus.

The Pozen Social Innovation Prize will primarily help us with growth. Currently, the largest problem is expanding to new campuses. We have a plan to automate the entire growth process for starting at new schools, and we are hoping to hire a small team to help us implement this.