Hosting the On|Off Party
Wavey Garms is one of the many e-commerce sites spawned from eBay, the Facebook selling group was set up 18 months ago on a small scale and has since become the go-to site for discerning youth after new and vintage streetwear. It’s now at the point of dictating what young people wear, ahead of even trend forecasters.
Set up by Andres Branco, 25, a former chef, and later joined by his girlfriend, Gabrielle Roberts, 24, a fashion graduate, it was created in part as a reaction to Branco’s experiences of eBay: “He was fed up with all the fees and having to trawl through tat to get what he wanted” explains Roberts. Their main goal was to create a “cool” environment for like-minded people to buy and sell niche clothing.
18 months on, Wavey Garms has over 70,000 users between 16 and 30-ish, three groups (Wavey Garms, Wavey Garms Ladies and Wavey Kicks) and 7,050 people on the waiting list. As Vice put it more succicntly, Wavey Garms is “Reddit for people selling old Hilfiger windbreakers instead of atheism”.
Streetwear seems to be the overriding theme on Wavey Garms, and the pair have accidentally or not hit upon a largely untapped market: “We knew streetwear was big, but we never thought it was grow at the rate it has,” says Roberts.
Morwenna Ferrier, The Guardian
