82 THECUTAUGUSTSEPTEMBER,
only be called a Depop commune.
Once, they were two accounts: Masha
and Jlynn. Now they are Masha & Jlynn
(@Masha_Jlynn), a Depop supergroup.
Masha was growing fed up with the back-
end business of selling on Depop, fielding
endless negotiations from buyers trying to
drive down prices. “She was ready to give
up,” Jlynn (pronounced “Jay-Lynn”) says,
“and we ended up talking about merging.
She was going to move to another state. I
was like, ‘Just move here.’”
And so, Masha Roush ended up moving
from California to Slidell, Louisiana, ear-
lier this year to join the new business part-
ner she hadn’t been looking for. (They
were introduced by a mutual friend and
seller on the app.) They are a little older—
Jlynn is 28, Masha is 23—so the pair have
made Depop into a career, though it is
starting to resemble more of a lifestyle. “It’s
both of our household incomes,” Jlynn
says. “Our husbands homeschool our kids.
We bought land, and we’re about to start a
farm situation.”
Their shop has the quasi-professional
gleam that comes with full-time focus.
Jlynn, a former model, and Masha pose for
most of their images, many photographed
on a picturesque tree-lined road by their
homes: Eden with high-waisted Guess
jeans. People message often asking for
advice. “I always tell them, ‘Just take nice
pictures and sell what you like,’ ” Jlynn
says. “A lot of people don’t realize how
much of a job it is to keep a shop going like
this. It’s full time. Beyond full time.”
Anna Crysell, 26, and Kristina Karner,
32, started a Depop together to pay for a
vacation a year ago. Instead, says Kristina,
“We moved in together to streamline our
shipping process.” They source five days a
week to keep up stock. L.A. is vintage para-
dise, glutted with the overflow of Holly-
wood studios and costume shops, but even
there, the bounty is not infinite. “There’s a
slight competition at the sourcing spots,”
Kristina says diplomatically.
Their Depop shop, Singulier, is unusually
atmospheric: blue-sky vistas, sea, sand and
gravel, rock formations, and rolling road-
ways. Both have experience in the fashion
industry (Anna is a former model, Kristina
Depop
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 55a designer), and they realized that the better
their items looked, the more they’d sell. So
they insist on shooting on location, packing
up 100 or more items and camping out
overnight in the desert a drive away from
their L.A. home to stage daylong fashion
shoots. “That’s why, when sometimes kids
are like, ‘Can you hook me up on the price?’
I’m like, you lug this leather jacket through
the Mojave,” Kristina says. “We’re doing
makeup in the car-side mirror with 40-mph
wind and sand. But we get the shot.” (@
Singulier’s prices tend to be a bit higher
than the platform’s average; they estimate
$40 per item and sell on average 300 pieces
a month. They prefer not to reveal their
income, but scratch-pad math suggests this
volume would net them an annual
$144,000 gross.)
Anna and Kristina’s special focus is sus-
tainability, which comes up often in Depop
discussions, as well as those about the pet
passions of Gen Z. The styles they sell range
widely by design, all the better to cater to
customers across the board. That could
mean a spangled, see-through crop top
(perfect, per its hashtags, for #burningman
#coachella) on the one hand or men’s Dick-
ies work pants on the other. Personal taste
plays into it, but only so much. “Definitely,
sometimes we’re thrifting and we’re like,
‘This is so Depop,’ ” Kristina says. “We both
hate it, but we’ve got to buy it.”O
n mott street toward
the eastern fringe of Soho,
a large red awning an-
nounces Depop to the
neighborhood. Cha Cha
Matcha, the millennial-pink green-tea
chain, is just around the corner. “The over-
flow from there is great,” says the 23-year-
old minding the shop, known on Depop as
Emma Rogue. (The Emma Rogue account
features a juicy background of neon or-
ange or yellow, with a parade of the ’90s
and the aughts: Tommy Hilfiger, Ro-
cawear, Lisa Frank, Paul Frank.)
The store—in Depop parlance, the
“space,” with a counterpart in L.A.—is one
of the ways the company’s online world is
making inroads into the physical one.
And other portals into Depopism are in
the offing: a just-opened pop-up space in
Selfridges, the London department store,
as well as an upcoming partnership with
the downtown fashion incubator VFiles
on its sourced-from-the-internet designer
runway show.
The New York Depop is not a store in
the traditional sense, though there are
things for sale, like a $100 Korn T-shirt,
from a rotating group of Depop sellers
whom the company invites to send their
best on consignment. There is also alibrary, with books on fashion and pho-
tography, and benches for sitting and
people watching. But at least half the
store’s space is given over to large, seam-
less, professional-quality lights, tripods,
and photo equipment. For two-hour
blocks three days a week, any Depop user
can book a free session at the in-store stu-
dio to improve their photos and, hope-
fully, their sales.
On a recent Tuesday morning, Matt
Stockert, a 24-year-old from Sayville,
Long Island, was in the back of the shop,
posing before his iPhone against a vivid-
yellow paper backdrop. Matt runs
@ Hipsterhut, where he sells the thrifted
pieces he finds with a strong bent for nos-
talgic cartoon-laden bits from the ’90s
and early aughts. (His secret: church
thrift stores.) Nostalgia is good business.
“When you get somebody in their feels,
something that brings them back,” he
says. He gestures down at his T-shirt
emblazoned with the logo of the ’90s
video game Crash Bandicoot, a Depop
find. “This is a game I used to play all the
time with my dad.”
Matt doesn’t actually need Depop’s stu-
dio. His father is the super of the apartment
complex where the family lives, so he has
been able to create his own studio in a stor-
age room with sections themed by decade
and props and sets specific to each one (for
the ’70s, an orange couch and patterned
wallpaper; for the ’90s, a graffiti wall). Pro-
duction values, he says, get your photo
noticed; putting your face into it—he has a
number of boy-band poses—might help
you become a Depop celebrity.
So might regular visits to the Depop
shop, where he chats up the staff. The
promise of the “Explore” page, which Depop
staffers curate from users’ feeds and display
to anyone browsing, might bring hundreds
more views, likes, and follows to his account.
Matt is not a full-time Depopper. He has
a job at Starbucks. But even with that, he
goes thrifting three or four times a week,
and on Depop he makes around $3,000 a
month. By the platform’s standards, this
makes him a start-up, although thanks to
his enthusiasm, the company has made
him a student ambassador. He has without
question been an evangelist: His mother
now has a platform, where she sells her
own vintage finds; his girlfriend too,
though she mostly shops. Matt is currently
finishing a marketing degree at Arizona
State University online. And then?
“I want to work at Depop,” he says. “I
want to take any opportunity I can to come
in and just meet them, talk to them, show
them that I’m passionate about them. That
is my goal: to eventually work at Depop.
Whatever they need.” ■