Madi Donohoe, 22, from Frinton, Essex, used to earn £9 an hour as a care worker. She quit after six months in December 2022 because of health conditions including chronic pain and fibromyalgia. Now she makes around £55,000 a month reselling clothes.
After leaving her job, she had no set plan. Then she bought an "ugly" pair of trainers from her local Nike shop for £25 and sold them on Vinted for £50. She said: "I don’t know why I did it, but they sold, so I thought, 'I'm missing a trick here'."
From charity shops to live auctions
Madi bulk bought Jibbitz for Crocs from Temu at £2 each and sold them on Vinted for £4 each. She started visiting Nike shops multiple times a week, reselling clothes at double the price. She spent her days scouring charity shops, market stalls and outlets for bargains.
About a year after she began selling, she discovered Tilt, a live auction app where sellers host real-time sales. In her first month she made £800 profit; in her second, that rose to £5,400. By the end of her first year, she had made £356,000.
Averages £55,000 a month
From November 2025 to June 2026, Madi made £513,000 from reselling, averaging around £55,000 a month. She now does around two live streams a week, each lasting three to five hours, and sends about 200 parcels a week. She pays someone to pack her parcels.
Her stock includes everything from £15 badges to £2,000 prototype jackets, with live auctions getting up to 1,000 viewers. She has loyal customers who watch all her live streams and spend thousands of pounds a month.
Madi puts her success down to doing things slowly and steadily and not pushing herself.
She said: "Reselling has given me so much freedom. I was having to call in sick a lot in my old job, which I never wanted to do, and now I don’t have to worry about that. It’s given me the chance to have the best quality of life I can have."
Of her old job, she said: "It was awful. We were understaffed and underpaid."
