Stephanie Satchouk remembers the wedding dress as if it were her own. The off-white satin, the taffeta overskirt, the simple neckline, the sequined chrysanthemum adorning the bodice. "It was nothing flashy. That's what I liked about it," she says, sitting in front of an aging computer in her cluttered one-car garage.
It was also a good find. Satchouk bought the dress at a garage sale not far from her San Jose, Calif., home for a mere $4. She thought she'd make a few bucks putting it up for sale at online auctioneer eBay (EBAY) for $9.99. A few days later, a vintage-clothing shop in Lakewood, Ohio, snapped it up for $100.
That was early in 1998, months before the 33-year-old Satchouk started keeping a soft-bound ledger, now a well-worn record of the nearly 1,000 items she has bought at local auctions and garage sales and then sold on eBay. It was before she spent hours a day at the computer in her overstuffed garage, checking the progress of dozens of auctions. The wedding dress, in fact, was the spark that ignited a new business that has become her primary source of income.
Now Satchouk is among the thousands of people who have joined a new class of Internet entrepreneurs. For some, like Satchouk, it was fortuitous; for others, a deliberate plan. Yet across the country, people specializing in everything from camera equipment to vintage records have become professional online storekeepers, pumping new life into a nontraditional segment of the U.S. economy.
This is not a business populated by venture-backed startups with lavish marketing budgets. It is mostly made up of home-based and small businesses that grow only as much as their profits allow.
While eBay is largely responsible for jump-starting this grassroots revolution, many other sites, ranging from rival online auctioneers to those that help individuals set up online stores, are hoping to benefit from this entrepreneurial spirit. Some are challenging eBay's hegemony by targeting niche markets, while others provide retail venues that could prove more attractive than eBay to some of these homespun merchants.
While none of these new venues so far has proven as effective as eBay, many are making gains and are certain to compete with the leading Net auctioneer in the long term.
Jim Breyer, managing partner of Accel Partners (dossier), a Palo Alto, Calif.-based venture firm, calls the emergence of these new Internet merchants "truly phenomenal," and says Wall Street and private investors have failed to fully grasp the significance of the trend. "It is almost impossible to peg" the size of the phenomenon, Breyer adds. "But we certainly know that the market is large and growing like wildfire."
For Satchouk, the wedding dress was also a bit of a salvation. Back in 1997, she worked two jobs and drove 80 miles round-trip nearly every day to take classes at the California Culinary Academy (dossier) in San Francisco. The heavy workload took its toll, and Satchouk became ill with anemia. Under doctor's orders to sleep 12 hours a day, she lost her jobs and was forced to drop out of school.
But the sale of the dress was an epiphany for Satchouk, who has always loved rummaging through antiques. "I decided then I was going to keep the $100, put it in my pocket and go to more garage sales," she says.
What she didn't know is that those garage sales would be the beginning of a lifestyle change. She began buying everything from vintage dresses and surplus designer bathing suits to Japanese pottery. As the items sold on eBay, she invested the profits into what has become a growing business.
By 8 a.m. every weekday morning, Satchouk sits in her garage-cum-office, a space that's packed with mink stoles, Chinese soapstone sculptures and an assortment of pottery. A makeshift loft overflows with used clothing, much of which Satchouk confesses she would like to keep.
On a recent morning, she eagerly checked her auctions. Some
