A Kent mum who started a business selling unwanted items from around her house now makes up to £2,000 a month selling premium second-hand clothes online, working just three hours per day.
Liv Needham, 27, started selling clothes she no longer needed in June 2024, when she was pregnant with her son. She realised she had “way too much stuff in the house and needed to make room for a baby”, and began listing them on the reselling platform Vinted and on Facebook Marketplace.
To her surprise, Liv made almost £1,000 over the course of three weeks, just from getting rid of things she no longer wanted, and realised this could become a great way to make some extra cash while caring for her baby.
Over the years, Liv has scaled her reselling into a fully fledged business, buying stock wholesale and developing a niche that draws in a reliable customer base, and can now make up to £2,000 profit per month while only working for a few hours every day.
“I was so desperate to be a mum – we had a very long journey of getting there, we ended up doing IVF – but I didn’t want to lose myself by not having a hobby. I wanted something for me, aside from looking after my little boy,” Liv told PA Real Life.
“I wanted something that made me feel excited, made me feel like I had motivation, and I just had that fire in my belly to start something new and to see how far I could take it.”
Liv was no stranger to entrepreneurship, having established a successful sales and marketing consultancy business with her husband, as well as renting out properties on Airbnb. However, she said she was “really surprised at how much I could make through things that I just had lying around the house”.
“And obviously, babies are very expensive, so it was great having that spare money.”
As Liv started to focus on reselling as a business venture, rather than just listing items she already owned, she began trawling car boot sales and charity shops for things she knew she could sell for a profit. She discovered a niche in premium branded menswear and womenswear, including the likes of Nike, North Face and Patagonia.
However, after her son was born in November 2024, she no longer had the time to spend hours looking for stock.
“The baby needed feeding every two hours, I couldn’t be traipsing around the shops,” she said
“So I needed to find another solution for me to be able to get stock in, to be able to make money, to be able to sell without it taking me loads of time.”
Liv decided to look into purchasing from wholesalers but she struggled to find one she really got on with. Then, she saw an advertisement for Fleek on TikTok, where she documents her reselling journey as @thelivneedham, and thought she’d “give it a go”.
“Fleek, essentially, is a wholesale app with loads of different suppliers all over the world, and they all list things on there that they have to sell,” Liv explained.
“When you go on the app, you can filter it by the brands that you want, the type of items that you want.
“My favourite thing about Fleek is that you can buy exact bundles… so it’s not blind shopping where you might get something good, but actually 90% of it is rubbish. You know exactly what is in there.”
After trying Fleek, Liv said she “made a lot of profit from it but, most importantly, saved so much time”.
“I could buy a greater scale of stock, in comparison to going out and spending two hours at the charity shops, finding three things. I could order a bundle of 20 items, it would take me 20 minutes to order online, and then it was going to arrive with me a couple of weeks later.
“It was a big time-saving hack for me in terms of being a mum with a newborn, demanding baby.”
In total, Liv spends around two to three hours per day on her reselling business. She uses the time when her baby is napping, and some time in the evening when her husband is home from work, to photograph items, list them, and film and edit her TikTok videos.
That’s what makes a reselling business great for mums like her, Liv said, as it offers flexibility. Plus, Liv added: “You don’t need any skills… you don’t need a really big outlay of money to be able to get started in it… You can literally start with what’s in your house”.
“I think the flexibility of it and the ability to take it as far as you want: If you want it just to be a little £50 extra a month, or if you want it to be £1,000 extra a month, you’ve got control of how much time and energy you put into it to be able to scale it.”
Now, Liv makes between £1,000 and £2,000 profit per month, with the months leading up to Christmas being the biggest months for her. This has grown over the years, but from the start she was able to make some extra pocket money for herself, at least.
Liv continues to resell to save money for a second round of IVF, in the hopes of growing her family.
For those interested in starting their own reselling business, Liv shared three essential tips from her experience.
Firstly, she said: “Do your research. You don’t need to be listing things for £2, £3. You can get so much more for your items if you make them look really well presented in your photographs.”
She added that it’s also important to “venture out into sourcing your stock from as many different places as possible – from your own house, from friends and family, from looking in charity shops and going to car boot sales, looking into wholesale.”
Finally: “Get on TikTok. Get in the community. Share your journey…
“The opportunities that can come your way, the communities that you can become involved in from doing that, makes it so much more than just making a bit of extra money.”
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