Mini-IKEA at your service! How 2-broke College Students Made $5000 flipping Furniture!
Written By: Nick Nguyen | Read full profile
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It’s the end of the semester and students across the country are frantically trying to sell all their furniture because their lease is up and they don’t want to get slapped with a $200 fine for leaving “trash” in their apartments.
Now, if you’ve ever been in Berkeley towards those last couple of weeks before May 31st and December 31st, you’ll know that all hell breaks loose. Typically, the first 2 weeks of May and December mark the dreaded finals weeks, starting first with dead week - a gift bestowed upon us stress-driven students by the gracious regents of Berkeley some many eons ago.
For those of you who don’t know, Dead Week is an entire week off where students get a chance to “study” diligently for any finals they may have and wrap-up any projects and papers that are needed to close out the semester.
Of course, most students blow the first 3-4 days of it travelling, going to raves, performing in AFX Showcases, or most notably, observing/partaking in the Naked Run in Main Stacks. *I say blow not because I’m judging them, but because I firsthand remember the feeling of regret and frustration at myself for doing any of the items above or more. I mean who could blame us? Some golden bears needed to blow off some steam!!
Anyways, I’d say a very hefty majority of Cal students are procrastinators* (you need to check out my post about creative procrastination and how it’s actually a good thing here), so those first 2 weeks of May and December are a complete wash. The only thing we do right before finals are: Eat. Study. And Stress out, sprinkled with a little sleeping here and there.
This meant that starting the 3rd week of the month, students begin frantically selling everything they own - either at an incredibly hefty discount or just giving it away for FREE!
I mean think about it, if your landlord gave you the option to move out early in exchange for a prorated rent, who wouldn’t want to GTFO sooner? There’s more money in a prorated rent than to risk not selling all your stuff and having to throw it away.
This is where resourceful savvy young entrepreneurs (a glorified way of saying desperate broke college students looking to make a quick buck) like my girlfriend and myself swooped in and picked up all the merchandise. Thank you Mom and Dad for buying me a 2006 Honda Pilot for my 19th Birthday and driving it all the way to Cali for me. Man! We used that car to haul everything, essentially wrecking the interior, but it was totally worth it. We still have that car today, running strong!
But we were watching Free and For Sale (FFS) like a hawk! If it was free or super cheap, and we knew we could move it, we grabbed it. We became a secondhand IKEA warehouse! Our fastest movers were Malm 4-drawer dressers and the Fjelsse Bedframe. Hot ticket items are 2 x 4 Kallax Shelving Units, Lack tables, and Hemnes bookshelves. We also picked up a bunch of Lifetime foldable tables, coffee tables, mattresses, bedframes, desks, etc.
We even had a blackbook of price targets to hit.
Let’s just say, we learned a lot about market research, taking risks, costs-benefits of time, gas, delivery fees, and how to dismantle essentially any IKEA furniture with a basic set of black and decker tools my dad bought me after moving to Berkeley (best $20 investment EVER).
Now, some people are going to read this and think we were taking advantage of other broke Berkeley students. But honestly, we just sold at whatever price we saw other people were able to sell the same product for! We didn’t push the limits and tried to move inventory fast, because you’re essentially sitting on it until 2 weeks before the start of the next semester (August, January, and briefly June because so few people are around during the summer).
And just like the pattern holds, you have an incredibly short window to make those sales before the market goes quiet: those 3 weeks at the start of the semesters as folks start moving in to their new leases on June 1st, August 1st, and December 1st.
We did fellow Berkeley students a favor! To beat out our competition, we offered free delivery and same-day haul away. Students were getting the best prices for quality products and we made sure to discount heavily for any cosmetic damages. Not to mention we did the City of Berkeley a service! If you’ve ever been around Berkeley the last week of May and December, you’ll see the city is an absolute dump because students that aren’t able to sell their stuff start tossing it onto the streets, overflowing dumpsters, and just randomly chucking the stuff on sidewalks!
This was good quality stuff gone to waste! So long-story short, we took some of that inventory in, and flipped it over 6 semesters, making over $5,000!
(And yes, we also gave away and donated a lot of things too to pass on the good karma, but these are more stories for another time).
