Maria Jones started selling clothing on Poshmark in October 2017. The 32-year-old, Garden Valley, California, mother of two initially started by selling clothes from her own closet. "The first thing I sold was my own personal H&M shirt," she says, and she quickly realized she could make a business selling other used clothing as well.

By 2020, she'd made tens of thousands of dollars on the site and decided to quit her full-time job in sales management to focus on motherhood and building out her store, The Lemon Theory. Among her tricks for buying cheap but quality inventory was purchasing pallets of hundreds of items from sites like Helpsy, which sells damaged clothing from brand names like Tommy Hilfiger and Madewell.

An item in each box can be about $8 on average, she says, "but you can sell it for $40."

The Lemon Theory has now grossed more than $300,000 in sales altogether. Here are two pieces of advice Jones would tell anyone keen to start their own Poshmark hustle.

'Start small'

"The biggest piece of advice that I give is to start small," she says. "Make sure it's something that you like and want to do before you dive in and start buying those big inventory boxes or big pallets."

To do this, she recommends starting by selling your own clothing on the site. The process includes photographing the items and sharing the listings, then packing and shipping what you've sold. "If you enjoy that at the beginning when you're doing it with your own stuff," Jones says, "then definitely use that to start going to thrift stores."

"I've unfortunately seen people dive in straight to the pallet," she says, "and then they get overwhelmed because they have 400 or 500 items to process."

Build an inventory system

Jones' other piece of advice: Figure out a system of organization early on.

"When I originally started it was, 'well there's a box of my inventory,'" she says. When she'd sell anything, "I'd have to rummage through the whole box and try to find the item." She then started putting clothing in bins. "I had a bin of sweaters, I had a bin of jeans, I had a bin of dresses."

When she scaled to hundreds of items of clothing and suddenly had four sweater bins to rummage through to find the one she'd sold, that, too, got tedious.

Now, she has a room in her house for listed inventory and labels each bin in it. She includes the bin's label in the listing of each item as well. "So if I list an item in bin r1, now I know go to that bin," Jones says. This kind of organization can help save time and frustration when you're hurrying to ship an item to a customer.

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