Is Vintage Reselling Cooked?

In June, 2025, Quinn Brown came across an old warmup jacket while digging through the bins at a Goodwill store in Hillsboro, Oregon. Bright yellow with purple lettering, the jacket bore a LA Lakers patch on the front, and the name CHAMBERLAIN across the back. Brown, a 19-year-old vintage reseller, didn’t know if it was worth anything, but he snapped it up for $3 anyway. The jacket, as it turned out, was worth significantly more than that. Not only did it once belong to NBA legend Wilt Chamberlain, but he wore it during the 1972 NBA Finals, when the Lakers beat the New York Knicks to clinch the team’s first championship win since 1954. The jacket ended up selling for $89,600 at a Sotheby’s auction last month, netting Brown an approximately 3 million percent return on his $3 investment. It was the kind of score vintage resellers dream of, and—according to those who spend their days picking through Goodwill’s famed blue bins—one that’s become vanishingly rare.Spend any time with vintage resellers, and at some point, the conversation will inevitably turn to their gripes about Goodwill. They’ll tell you that the bins—the giant blue carts full of unsorted donations that can be bought by the pound at certain Goodwill locations—aren’t what they used to be. The competition has gotten too intense, they’ll moan, and invariably, their ire will wind up directed at Goodwill’s e-commerce platform, ShopGoodwill.com.The eBay-esque auction website, which has been around since 1999, lists around 600,000 items (including a surprising number of covetable vintage watches) for sale at any given time, all sourced from Goodwill donation centers around the country. In 2025, the platform logged a record $450 million in revenue, a 22% increase over the previous year. Resellers often accuse the non-profit of hoarding all of the most valuable donations it receives for ShopGoodwill.com, making it harder for them to source quality items in the bins or on the racks.Today, the vintage clothing market is booming, thanks to Gen Z-targeted platforms like Depop (which was recently acquired by eBay in a $1.2 billion cash deal) and the rise of reseller content creators on Instagram and TikTok. New players in the field continue to pop up like weeds, such as the Lithuanian company Vinted, which recently expanded across the pond with a $9-billion valuation.According to a report conducted by the consulting firm McKinsey and The Business of Fashion, the resale market is growing two to three times faster than traditional retail, with nearly 60% of global consumers now willing to buy secondhand fashion. Even mega-brands like H&M, Levi’s and The North Face are getting in on the action, inviting customers to trade in gently used pieces for store credit and offering them up for resale on their certified pre-owned platforms. All this means that there’s never been more money to be made reselling vintage clothing, but not necessarily for independent resellers.Julian Kurhajec, 22, relies on the Goodwill bins to fuel his vintage clothing business, New Jersey Steals. Mostly dealing in T-shirts (he recently sold a vintage Caesars Emperor’s Club tee to Tiësto), he has begun to wind down his Depop operation, in part because the market has become so saturated. “Goodwill has caught on to this whole resale market, and they've hired much better people to filter what goes out to the floor,” Kurhajec says. Not only are there fewer gems to be uncovered, he notes, but there are now far more pickers competing for them. “A couple of years ago, you’d be able to have a bin or two to yourself. Now you’re lucky if there’s only one other person in your bin. If you don’t see [something valuable] on top, you really don’t get much.”Kurhajec partially blames himself, and other resellers like him, for blowing up the bins on Instagram. The Instagram account @TrueVintageAwards, for instance, posts user-submitted photos of insane vintage scores, like a 1920s-era Brown’s Beach Jacket (worth as much as $10,000) found on Marketplace or a pair of 1940s Levi’s pulled from a thrift store rack. Goodwill executives see those posts too, and Kurhajec has noticed a corresponding increase in desirable items, like rare band tees and single-V sweatshirts, hitting ShopGoodwill.com. “They didn’t have that quality of stuff a couple of years ago,” Kurhajec says.ShopGoodwill.com has also been the subject of a few viral moments of its own. Earlier this year, the platform offered up a World War II-era Levi’s jacket for auction, complete with the original owner’s name scribbled inside the collar and a vintage WWII Squadron patch sewn to the chest. It eventually sold to Levi’s itself for $10,001, and now resides in the denim giant’s famed San Francisco archive.Resellers might bemoan the rising clout of Goodwill’s auction site, but it’s a good news story for the nonprofit, which says it redirects more than 80% of its earnings towards job training programs and other community projects. Selling higher-value pieces online allows Goodwill to earn more per item, says George R. Burt, the chief operating officer of ShopGoodwill.com. “If you get [a luxury item] from Versace or Louis Vuitton, you can sell it all day long for $8 in the store,” he explains, “but we have an obligation to maximize the value for our community. That’s our role.” Despite this, Burt insists that only a tiny fraction of donations end up on the website. “Less than 2% of the items [donated to Goodwill] end up on e-commerce,” he says. “So there are still a lot of great things in the store.”While there may be more clothing than ever entering the secondhand market, a deluge of fast fashion pieces has also made finding valuable items more difficult. “The product is of lower quality, there’s more of it they have to sort through,” explains Emily Stochl, a journalist who has covered the vintage and secondhand market for over a decade through her platform Pre-Loved. “That’s why charity shops are increasingly making some of these moves toward market-rate pricing, online marketplaces, and auctions to fund their charitable missions.”Furthermore, Stochl points out, as vintage and secondhand clothing has become more popular and online platforms have made it easier to buy and sell, individuals who may have previously donated grandpa’s old jeans to Goodwill are now more likely to try to make a profit on them directly.Part of what fuels resellers’ angst towards Goodwill is the perception that too much of the nonprofit’s revenue goes towards executive pay. Critics cite a Goodwill president in Oregon who was lambasted in 2005 after his $831,508 salary was deemed “unreasonable” by a state audit, and a Nebraskan Goodwill CEO who courted similar controversy in 2018 for earning over $900,000, sparking an investigation by that state’s attorney general. Today, those reports remain top of mind for some resellers. “I know they're supposed to be a nonprofit… but then you look at the paychecks of the higher-ups in Goodwill,” says Kurhajec.Burt says Goodwill maintains checks and balances that keep salaries in step with the nonprofit’s mission. “There’s nobody that’s lining their pockets,” he says. “We have boards of directors, we have governance, we have audits in order to keep [our] nonprofit status.”Whether or not that’s the case, it doesn’t change much for resellers who are finding their margins squeezed by competition, both from other sellers and Goodwill itself. It’s not all bad news, though, especially for those who covet ‘90s band tees, WWII deck jackets, and old-school selvedge dungarees. Thanks to a thriving ecosystem of independent sellers and major platforms, including ShopGoodwill.com, it’s never been easier to find your grail—for a price. As for resellers, Burt believes there’s still more than enough product to go around. “Maybe they will have to work a little bit harder, or have to strategize or pivot a little bit more to find their niche. But at the end of the day, there’s plenty here.”