Jeremyn Lee is a fan of luxury labels like Prada and Balenciaga and spends his weekends roaming their sleek flagship stores in New York City. However, he is also a frequent shopper of secondhand items, like DC skate shoes — he has purchased more than a dozen pairs — and board shorts from the surf brand Billabong.
For those items, he shops on Depop.
“It’s easier to use than other sites, and there’s more trendy or relevant stuff on there,” said Mr. Lee, 29, a shoe designer. “You can find all the smaller designers or Y2K brands.”
“I look at it almost every day,” he added, praising the simple user interface. “I just look at the feed.”
If the RealReal is known for high-end vintage and Grailed for buzzy streetwear, Depop has carved out a niche as a sort of Salvation Army for Gen Z. It positions itself somewhere between the havoc of a thrift store and the easy time-suck of a social media app, serving up algorithm-driven suggestions based on past searches and likes. Its users skew young — mostly Gen Z and young Millennials, according to the company — and they use it to buy and sell a vast amount of product. To that end, some 400,000 items are uploaded each day.
Peter Semple, who was named chief executive of Depop in July after having served as the company’s chief marketing officer since 2019, said the challenge was to balance the frictionless transactions consumers had come to expect from online shopping with the thrill of a thrift store hunt.
“We’re a retail destination, and a retail destination should be efficient,” said Mr. Semple, who first fell in love with online shopping in the early aughts on sneaker forums. “You should be able to find what you’re looking for quickly.”
“But to use the analogy of physical retail, some stores are actually exciting to step over the threshold and into,” he added. “They have energy.”
He has sought to lure shoppers away from retail and onto Depop, and for many customers, that retail energy is recreated by the “Suggested for You” feed that greets them when they open the app. Like most digital-first companies, Depop leverages data to create a customized experience for each user.
‘An Element of Socialness’
Take Alice Hu, 25, who is based in Pittsburgh and uses Depop to buy cheap basics and scour for designer deals, like her favorite purchase to date, a Bottega Veneta skirt she got for only $20. She likes that sellers often have a point of view — a “curation,” as she calls it — and that you can see who they follow.
“There’s an element of socialness,” said Ms. Hu. It’s what Mr. Semple would call “community,” a core tenet of the company (others include accessible aspiration, self-expression and circularity). “Like, being able to stalk people,” Ms. Hu added. “You see this profile, and they have a bunch of cute stuff that you like. So you go in their likes and you just stalk what they have saved.”
Selling items that no longer suit you is also a vital part of Depop.
“I’ve found that Depop is really focused on the seller experience, whereas other platforms emulated the Amazon model of just always siding with the customer,” said Camden Davison, a top seller on the app.
Mr. Davison, 28, supplements his income as a store associate at an outdoor retailer in Los Angeles by selling items on Depop, and estimates he makes around 20 percent of his income that way. He likes that it is easy to list items and that the app does not charge fees to sellers. “Once you’ve built a following and people know about your shop, it’s easier to sell your items,” he said.
It is also simple for buyers. First-time users are prompted to choose styles and brands they like, which shapes their algorithm. The more time you spend on the app, and the more products you “like,” the more it understands what you want to see. Mr. Semple refers to it as “merchandising” — a way for the app to impart a sense of order onto the millions of possible products a user could see.
A Symbiotic Relationship
Founded in 2011 by the Italian entrepreneur Simon Beckerman, Depop was created as the e-commerce arm of a culture magazine. The company, which is headquartered in London, grew steadily through rounds of funding until the Covid-19 pandemic closed down physical retail stores and turbocharged online shopping. In April 2020, Mr. Semple said, Depop’s business almost doubled.
“I say this with a heavy heart because so many people’s businesses really struggled and didn’t recover from Covid, but our problem was that the scale was beyond what we were remotely equipped to manage,” he said. “We had emergency phone calls because our tech stack couldn’t take that number of visits.”
Today, inflationary concerns, tariff-based levies and a general cynicism over luxury prices have led to a “golden age” of secondhand shopping, from which Depop has benefited. Some statistics suggest the pre-owned clothing market is growing as much as seven times as quickly as the fashion retail sales sector as a whole.
In 2021, the American company Etsy bought Depop for $1.6 billion, partly to broaden its appeal to younger consumers. On a recent visit to the Etsy office building in Dumbo, Brooklyn, a large floor was being designed to accommodate Depop’s growing team.
Helping figure out how the companies can fit together is Kruti Patel Goyal, a longtime Etsy employee who served as Depop’s chief executive for nearly three years, starting in 2022, before being named president and chief growth officer of Etsy. She sees the companies as having a symbiotic relationship.
“Etsy has a longer history, so it can bring learnings to help Depop mature as it scales,” she said. “On the flip side, I think coming back from Depop, what’s been really great is bringing that fresh perspective that’s really app-first, youth-driven, discovery-oriented shopping.”
While Depop provided data to demonstrate its growth — in the second quarter of 2025, sales were up 54 percent year-over-year in the United States — Mr. Semple is more proud of the ineffable markers of cultural relevance, like a mention in a “Saturday Night Live” skit starring Sydney Sweeney, or being name-checked in the lyrics of a Doechii song.
“We have an identity and are participating in culture,” he said. “And that’s an amorphous thing to invest time and energy in.”
‘It Feels Personal’
Depop has, in the past, participated in real-world activations, including pop-up shops at the department store Selfridges and at Ralph Lauren boutiques. Depop also hosted flea markets to bring the scavenging energy to life for consumers. And they’ve encouraged designers like Anna Sui and Rodarte to open up shops, while working with brands like Adidas and Vans to create products made from upcycled materials.
“The through line is to involve our community and focus on shopping secondhand first,” said Steve Dool, the senior director of brand for Depop.
Depop’s sellers often model their own offerings, which helps individualize things.
“It feels personal,” said Casey Lewis, who writes the newsletter After School about the consumption habits of Gen Z and Gen Alpha. “Like this person has decided to part lovingly with their ‘vintage’ Forever 21 top, and they share selfies of themselves and how they’re styling it.”
This intimacy — which Ms. Lewis called “appealingly chaotic” — manifests in other ways, like the rambling, flowery product descriptions some sellers use. “They’re almost like fashion blog posts,” she said. “Several girls have gone viral for the lore that they share.”
The charms of this hyper-personal feeling can also be its downside. A Reddit page dedicated to Depop, which has 217,000 members and is not affiliated with the brand, is filled with stories of seller interactions gone awry, long shipping times or complaints of low offers that some sellers find insulting.
“The biggest pros of it being a sort of social app and being able to buy a unique thing from a single person is also the bad part,” said Ms. Hu, who recounted a story of a friend receiving a package with stray pieces of cat food inside, and how she was once sent a Margiela dress in the wrong size. (She was unbothered, because she felt she got a deal.) “You are dealing with a human being on the other side.”
Doubling down on its social media-like feel, Depop recently debuted Outfits, a section of the app where users are encouraged to build shoppable mood boards. Ms. Lewis saw it as a move to emulate Pinterest’s popularity with young shoppers.
“A lot of people assume that Pinterest is an elder-Millennial platform, but, in fact, it’s really extraordinarily popular with Gen Z,” she said. “And a lot of Gen Alphas are on it because their parents feel that it’s safe. So I do think it’s interesting for Depop to add a collage tool because it touches on manifesting and aesthetics, and all of that collaging is very much something that young people are into.”
Indeed, Ms. Lewis said she thought Depop was positioned to remain popular with the upcoming generation, though she wondered about what products would be available in the coming years. Would the Zara and Shein items that fill young people’s closets today have the same cachet as vintage Levi’s and J. Crew? Or, as she asked, would it be “a glut of crap?”
For Ms. Hu, Depop’s allure comes from how much it has permeated the lives of people of her generation.
“It’s weirdly been part of our identity,” she said. “It’s how we grew up.”
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