If you’ve been lucky enough to visit an outdoor gear resale store in a place like Colorado or California, you’ve experienced gear nerd heaven. Retro puffers, almost-new tents, and barely used hiking boots galore are all available at heavily discounted prices. Unfortunately, people in rural areas or cities outside major outdoor recreation hubs don’t have access to the same variety of affordable used gear. There are some online platforms, but many are run by individual brands, and REI discontinued its online resale shop last year.
This hole in the market is exactly what outdoor content creators Zoe and Kelby Jecker, who go by the name The Adventure Addicts, are trying to fill. The duo’s new outdoor gear resale platform, The Gear Project, will launch on Sept. 10, and it’s already making waves online.
How The Gear Project Works
In a conversation with GearJunkie, Zoe Jecker explained that they modeled the site after popular peer-to-peer fashion reselling sites like Depop and Poshmark. The process to both buy and sell is pretty simple. Sellers create a listing describing the item and its condition with photos, and set a price. When someone buys it, they choose a shipping option. The seller prints the label, boxes up the item, and drops it off at the Post Office.
Once the item arrives to the buyer, they have 72 hours to make sure it is what they purchased. The seller then gets paid; all payments occur securely through Stripe. The site takes a 30% cut of the list price.
The Jeckers specifically chose a peer-to-peer model instead of a centralized distribution system like GearTrade, where sellers mail their items in, and then the company takes care of the rest.
“Sellers [on GearTrade] are making a pretty small commission comparatively and you also then lose your gear if it doesn’t sell or you have to pay to ship it back to you,” Jecker explained. With The Gear Project, sellers keep possession of their items and get to price them.
The Jeckers are working on adding additional features to the platform in the future to make it even more user-friendly. They plan on launching a dedicated app for the platform soon, which will allow sellers to take photos of gear directly in the app. They hope to add a feature where you can search by what is close to you to cut down on shipping costs, or even a “local pick-up” option. If the buyer and seller both live in Seattle, why pay extra to ship something?
While there is a messaging feature between buyers and sellers, Jecker is considering adding a feature where interested buyers can “make an offer” on an item. If the seller accepts, then it’s a deal.
“My biggest concern at the very beginning was that I don’t want people get inundated with low ball offers because sometimes that happens on Facebook Marketplace … I wanted to wait on that for now. Our biggest goal was a platform is we built it for our audience and we are we trying to create something that they want to use. So we are open to suggestions throughout the whole thing,” Jecker explained.
What You Can Buy and Sell
As The Gear Project gets going, Jecker imagines that outdoor apparel will be one of the primary categories. Most of us have a puffer or jacket hanging in our closet that we don’t wear much anymore or that no longer fits, and most of us also don’t want to pay over $200 for a new one. The current categories on the site include:
- Footwear
- Camp & hike: sleeping bags, sleeping pads, backpacks, tents, camp furniture, camp kitchen, hydration, pets, and more
- Men’s, women’s, and kids’ apparel: jackets, shirts, pants, shorts, swimwear, and accessories
- Snow: ski gloves, poles, goggles, packs, bindings, snowshoes, and microspikes
- Bike: bike parts, accessories, and apparel
Shipping costs are the main limiting factor of what can be listed on the site. It would be great for people to be able to sell their used bikes, but a large, bulky item like that can easily cost $200 to ship. If it can fit in a 30-inch–sized box, it’s good to go.
Like most other gear resellers, The Gear Project won’t sell any climbing safety equipment like harnesses or helmets. Other items that are not eligible to be sold include items with embedded batteries, socks, underwear, knives, and PFDs. Gear should be without any holes, stains, rips, or other noticeable damage.
The Why
Through their backpacking and hiking content, the Jeckers have built quite the following. Their Instagram page, the Adventure Addicts, has over 815,000 followers. For Jecker, The Gear Project is the culmination of their journey: It will hopefully make it more accessible for people to get the gear they need to get outside.
“It’s all for this community that we have built … We’ve been given everything by this community that has supported us for such a long time and this is our first attempt at giving back. We could never give back as much as we’ve gotten from our community, and this is like we really want to give back to the outdoor community in a way that feels like most true to us. I’ve never felt more with anything in my entire life, which I just think is really, really cool,” she said.
