Grailed: the internet’s foremost purveyor of aftermarket streetwear and menswear. Looking for some vintage Raf Simons? Missed out on Supreme’s recent drop and willing to bite the bullet for the piece you want? Need a well-worn pair of boots so you don’t have to break them in yourself? You can find all of those things plus thousands of other pieces in Grailed’s endless tome of listings.
If you’re not already familiar with Grailed, it’s “sexy eBay”, in the words of Grailed branding director and former Four Pins (R.I.P.) editor Lawrence Schlossman. The site is entirely composed of men’s clothing, footwear, and accessories both used and new from the most popular and desirable brands in the world today.
Grailed has made great strides in eliminating all the headaches and bullshit that usually come with purchasing aftermarket garments on the Internet. Here’s how it works: sellers display their items with a price including shipping. Buyers can make offers on those items. If the seller chooses to accept the offer, then the buyer can purchase the item, and the seller will ship it directly to their doorstep. Grailed monitors every step of the process, making sure that neither the buyer or the seller is engaged in any shady business, and takes a small fee for providing the platform and security necessary to complete the transaction.
It’s pretty great. Every brand/piece you could want under one roof? Yeah, it certainly makes adding new pieces to your wardrobe simple.
However there’s a few things you need to know to have the best buying experience possible on Grailed. If you go in, recklessly copping jawns without knowing the art of working a deal, not only are you going to get taxed heavily on your purchases … you may also get scammed as well. Thankfully, we’re experienced Grailed users, and we’re more than willing to share what we know with you, our KicksOneTwo family.
We present to you our best tips and tricks for making sure that your Grailed experience is a good one. Follow these closely, and you’ll be copping fire jawns for better prices than you ever dreamed of faster than you can say “Ispentmyentiresavingsaccountonboxlogos”. Let’s do it.
Make A Solid Initial Offer
Due to the buyer being able to make offers on items for sale on Grailed (unless the seller chooses otherwise, which is uncommon) the initial price of an item will typically be 15-30% higher than fair market value. The seller prices their items highly because they plan on taking lower offers than the list price, and they still aim to get back what they actually want for the item.
Here’s a simple example: say someone is selling a Bape hat that’s worth $100. They know if they price the hat at $100 for starters, they’ll be offered less, somewhere in the neighborhood of $75-$85. To avoid this conundrum, they price the hat at $120, knowing that they’ll be offered around $90-$100.
Your initial offer on an item is crucial to your success in paying what you want. There’s a fine line to walk: your offer should be on the low side because the seller will obviously retaliate with a higher counter-offer (or you may just get lucky and have them accept it), but if your offer is too low, then you’ll be branded as a lowballer (a damming term in the online resell market) and the seller won’t want to do business with you at all because your initial offer will be deemed insulting.
So toe the line carefully. From our experience, an initial offer of around 75% of what the item is listed for on Grailed is a good starting point. It’s tempting enough that some sellers may be willing to accept it, but it’s still low enough that you have plenty of wiggle room if the seller wants to return with a counter-offer.
Just remember: the first offer is the most important, and if you start out on the wrong foot, you’re not going to be able to get the item for the price that you want.
Dive In Deep
There’s hundreds of thousands of items on Grailed. If you can dream it, you can very likely turn it up. You can find everything from a GR pair of Jordans to the rarest vintage Tommy you can imagine to an Original Fake tee from the mid-00’s to a pair of Number (N)ine pants. It’s not a stretch to say that the entirety of men’s fashion, from streetwear to suiting (if you’re into that formal stuff … we’re not) is at your fingertips.
So go ahead and get lost in the plethora of jawns. Search something random, like a color or a word that crosses your mind and see what pops up. Click through the recently added items and see if anyone’s posted a gem for sale. Turn off all the product filters, and see what strikes your fancy (sometimes something is listed incorrectly and you won’t see it with the filters on).
You might find a great bargain, a piece that you’ve never seen before but have to get your hands on, a new brand that you weren’t familiar with, or a long-forgotten grail that you’d given up getting your hands on years ago. The ability to explore the entirety of streetwear is one of the very best things about Grailed’s interface, and you’re cheating yourself out of a very enjoyable part of the experience if you pigeonhole yourself into only looking at one or two things.
Be Patient
You’re going to see pieces on Grailed that you like. Not just one or two, a whole lot. Seemingly every time your open the site up there’s bound to be something new and exciting that’ll catch your eye and captivate your attention. So heed this advice: don’t go rushing to cop the first cool thing that you see. Like we said above: dive in deep
Trust us, we understand the desire to grab a fire jawn off the rip. No matter if it’s an extreme impulse purchase brought on by the desire for the short-term satisfaction of having copped something new or if it’s something you’ve been on the hunt for for years, we can admit that it’s an easy habit to fall into. But it would behoove you to remain calm, no matter how fire of a piece you may have stumbled across.
Put it in you fitting room and circle back around to it later after you’re done browsing the site. Take what we taught you about making a solid first offer and see if you can whittle the price down a bit before you decide if you want to cop or not. If someone isn’t willing to sell for the price you want, be patient. They may circle around and accept your offer later on if their item doesn’t sell as quickly as they were hoping. Make sure that you don’t have something similar in your wardrobe already, because remember: you can’t return anything that you cop on Grailed, you can just sell it again yourself and you’ll probably get back less than what you paid.
Trust us on this one: your Grailed experience will be much more pleasant if you take your time and think about which pieces would work the best in your wardrobe instead of rushing in willy-nilly, trying to buy as much fire as possible. It’s a slippery slope, and one that’s easy to begin sliding down at that, so be sure to let a cool head prevail instead of getting caught up in the heat of copping.
Don’t Make Trades Or Offsite Transactions
Although getting jumped for your kicks or having your jacket stolen off your back is largely a thing of the past and no longer commonplace in the modern-day world of streetwear, you shouldn’t get it twisted: you can still get licked in 2018. Getting masterfully finessed online isn’t all that different from getting jumped and having your gear taken … it just hurts less.
Thankfully, Grailed is one of the most secure spots that you can possibly do business online. All payments are handled through PayPal, and Grailed adds their own layer of security to the transactions with a dedicated fraud team and an appeals process for PayPal if they determine that an unfair judgement was reached on your claim. Plus, you don’t have to worry about authenticity of your products: if an item you buy is determined fake, it’s typically a breeze to get your money back, and Grailed’s team combs through the listings looking for fake items on a daily basis
However, you can’t use any of these great layers of security to your advantage if you conduct your business off the site. A go-to trick for scammers (the modern-day stick up kids) is to ask you to conduct business off the site, either by requesting you buy directly from them so they can skip paying the Grailed seller fee, or asking if you’d rather trade for their item.
Once in a blue moon when someone asks you about trades, you’re dealing with a legit person who just wants to wheel and deal unimpeded by the rules and regulations of the site… but if someone asks you to pay them in any other way than through Grailed and their payment system, that’s a huge red flag and a sure sign that you’ll be getting finessed if you go through with their request. If they offer you a better deal for going offsite, dead that line of communication immediately unless having no money and no gear sounds good to you. And if it does? Well, there’s not a whole hell of a lot more we can do for you.
So now you know. Learn how to make a good first offer. Dive deep into the site and see what you can turn up. Be patient, and make sure you don’t get caught up in any shady business. Follow these simple rules, and we can guarantee you that your wardrobe will be looking better than ever. You’ll be getting fits off and snapping necks like never before. Ignore them … and you may just find yourself lost in the sauce. And if you do, just know that we tried our very best to help you.
What’s your favorite thing about Grailed? Do you have any secret tricks that you use to get the best prices possible on your items? What’s your favorite piece that you’ve ever copped off the site? Sound off in the comments or hit us up and let us know on Twitter!
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