He got to chatting with a vintage clothes shop manager. Used-clothing wholesalers, the manager told him, serve as funnels for sourcing clothing, providing many second-hand stores with stock. These wholesalers were offline, so the retailers tended to travel to source goods from the wholesalers in person, picking through racks, going “heads down, bums up,” in the words of Arora, Fleek’s CEO.
That practice became impossible with travel restrictions, yet what this retailer had noticed was that a handful of the wholesalers had started showing off their goods on Instagram, and they were negotiating ad-hoc over video calls.