Emily Brodrick
This second-hand fashion empire is growing faster than it can hold onto its employees. What keeps Cuatli Kimbwala from leaving 2nd Street like the majority of his colleagues?
A Ship With Too Small A Crew
“It's like one of the worst jobs I've ever had,” Cuatli Kimbwala said before digging into a slice of margarita pizza from Little Italy Pizza III, just down the street from his job at 2nd Street Union Square, where he took his break for the day. “I've had some terrible jobs. I worked at an Amazon warehouse, I worked at a UPS warehouse,” but 2nd Street is different he said. It’s a mixture of “high school drama on top of manual labor, customer service, retail, you know…” he trailed off.
In the past month, Kimbwala said he has worked 168 hours according to the company’s system, but as he scanned the cryptic scheduling software, he said he’d worked a lot more than that off the clock.
As he spoke, he ripped apart his margarita slice with his hands, and marinara splashed into red puddles on the paper plate below. It was easy to see he was frustrated.
“Since I first started working here,” he reflected how he’s thought of the store “like a ship crew. And like every day I'm like, bro, I hope they got all hands on deck and it's going to be terrible.” Terrible, because all hands are not on deck, nor have they been for months.
Kimbwala said the store has been understaffed since several employees quit following the location’s grand opening in June, including the manager and the assistant manager. He said he comes to work imagining that he has to run the store by himself. He described his workload as intense.
“The ones that can make it through the day without feeling overwhelmed or crying or quitting, that's who we end up keeping,” he said. Though working at 2nd Street might seem “like a cool, easy, cushy job,” the hours are long, Kimbwala said, and he cries in the middle of his shift and skips his lunch breaks regularly.
Thrifting Trends
Buying second-hand fashion has become particularly trendy in the US recently. IBIS World’s data on thrift stores says as of 2023, there are roughly 28,850 thrift stores in the US, up from about 21,400 in 2013. That’s a 33% increase in the past 10 years. In 2017, there were 23,700 thrift stores says IBIS World, which means the number of thrift stores has increased by 22% in the last five years, versus just 11% in the five previous years.
Kimbwala’s employer, 2nd Street, a Japanese company, has picked up on that trend. It opened its first US store in Los Angeles in 2018, according to the company’s website. Its first East Coast store opened in SOHO in 2020, wrote Fashion Network, and since then, six more locations have popped up around NYC. The company has over 700 locations in Japan according to its website.
2nd Street’s model is a bit different from many other buy-sell-trade or consignment second-hand apparel stores. The store offers cash to sellers, on the spot, says the company’s website. Sellers don’t have to wait for items to sell in-store to get paid, and 2nd Street doesn’t do trades for store credit.
Since 2006 when she opened her second-hand store, Kate Goldwater, who owns AuH2O in the East Village, said she has noticed her store has been getting “busier and busier, and grown more and more each year.” She admitted that could be due to the store getting more positive press and friends telling each other about the store over time, but she also considered whether it could be related to the rise in the content she’d been seeing on social media about second-hand shopping. She talked about a TikTok trend “thrift hauls,” videos of shoppers detailing their recently, thrifted items and shopping experience.
“So definitely what I see is that thrifting is more popular. Um, I don't know necessarily if that is why we have had higher sales, why we've been growing more and more each year. Probably related,” said Goldwater.
Ashley Boman, a manager at the Beacon’s Closet in Manhattan added that selling second-hand apparel has become a way to make a lot of money, especially in NYC where many people have disposable wealth. “People are making their living out of going to the Goodwill bins then reselling what they find for cheap,” she said, adding “There are also specialty shops out there buying band tees off eBay & then selling them at astronomical prices.”
A Kid From California
Kimbwala’s first name Cuatli means “eagle” in the Aztec language, a symbol he said he identified with. He said his mother, who was born in Mexico and earned her Ph.D. when he and his two sisters were growing up, was constantly working after graduating. “My mom was gonna work every day. She has a bookstore [Cafe con Libros] and she's a principal of an elementary school. It's like books on the weekends, school on the week. Like, I have never seen my mom have a day off ever in her life,” Kimbwala said, noting that she had inspired his own intense work ethic.
Born and raised in Southern California, 23-year-old Kimbwala spent most of his upbringing in Claremont, a suburb of Los Angeles where he said he felt like an outcast, both in his home where he was the only male and in his hometown where over 47% of the population is white according to Data USA, (compared to NYC, which is about 32% white, says the 2022 census.)
Why Kimbwala decided to come to New York, versus another major city, he couldn’t say exactly, but he did have art and fashion on his mind once he arrived he said.
Unlike in California, Kimbwala isn’t afraid to look different these days. He wears a gummy bear backpack, jack-o-lantern-themed, fur-lined boots, has shoulder-length, multi-toned dreadlocks, and sports two large necklaces, one featuring a little green alien from Toy Story, and the other, the Iron.
The word “swag” came up often when he was talking, and it has an important resonance with his identity. When asked how he would define the word, he said “Most people understand it just like, your style, you know, but, I just see it as like, individualizing, kind of like, individualization.” He added later on the subject, “If you have a knowing of yourself, then sometimes that will reflect in how you dress.”
Quickly Hired, Quickly Promoted
After moving to New York in May, Kimbwala started handing out resumes to various clothing and art stores until one day he reached out to an old co-worker, Dom, from his previous job at DeeLux, a buy-sell-trade shop in Claremont. Dom had moved to New York to work at 2nd Street. So, Kimbwala gave Dom a resume, the hiring manager from 2nd Street quickly emailed Kimbwala to set up an interview, and by the end of the interview, his position at the company was a done deal.
“We have an interview and like, I feel like I always do good on interviews, but how the interview ended, I kind of felt like he already had decided that I would have got it,” he said. The interviewer’s last question, he said, was “‘Why should we hire you?’” But then he said the interviewer quickly added, “‘But I'm not gonna waste your time, you know, you're hired.’” Kimbwala chuckled as he replayed the interaction.
The process at Deelux had been similar, he recalled, when he showed up to the interview stoned but well-dressed. “Any question they asked, I would just start rambling and rambling and be like, ‘Wait, what's the question?’ But I just had my sister kind of dress me up before I went, so I could tell it wasn't based on anything I said.”
On June 13th, Kimbwala started working at 2nd Street to set up for the grand opening of their new Union Square location a month later, which turned out to be far more work than the company had described, causing many staff members to quit soon after the launch.
Then Kimbwala decided he wanted to be promoted to assistant manager, a position he was granted and began mid-October. But now he regrets taking on so much responsibility.
Even during his meeting about the promotion, he said the company was surprised he wanted to stay on. “So that kind of had me hurt. Cause I'm like, damn, so you guys know that this is unsustainable and no one can really take this,” he said. However, he acknowledged that working as hard as he has been was due to his own choices. “I asked for the full-time, I asked for the raise So it's like, I don't have an excuse. But, now my main wish is just less time dedicated to work.”
Is New York a Thrifting Hub?
Like Kimbwala, Kate Goldwater related to the idea of individualization when she said her relationship with thrifting developed out of a desire to stand out. “Everybody in my middle school was shopping at the mall, you know, Gap and Abercrombie, and I wanted to be the only one wearing, pants made out of a tablecloth,” she said.
When asked if she thought NYC was a thrifting hub, she surprisingly said no. “But it depends on what you call thrift, right? I would say thrifting and thrift is inexpensive,” she said, mentioning that many of the New York thrift stores she used to go to in the early 2000s like Andy’s Chee-Pees, and Cheap Jacks were misleadingly never very cheap.
“There are a ton of great second-hand stores, and there are a ton of vintage shops and amazing buy-sell-trade spots, but not necessarily affordable,” Goldwater said. “There's not that many options, like my store,” she said and added later “And my store, I always want it to be for everyone. I want it to be very affordable.”
Beacon’s Closet, can be on the pricier side, but because of its proximity to multiple universities, Boman said, they get a lot of students. She also said they see boutique owners come in who pick through their racks for items they can re-sell in their own store.
2nd Street is a different kind of thrift store from AuH2O or Beacon’s. At the Union Square. location, they have cases filled with multi-thousand dollar handbags, watches, and other accessories from designers like Gucci and Balenciaga.
What’s Keeping Kimbwala at 2nd Street?
Even with all that Kimbwala has to complain about work, there are also some beneficial aspects to working at 2nd Street, he admitted, including the connections he makes with his customers. “I meet a lot of cool people. Designers, influencers, you know, fashion students. And they kind of see me as a peer,” despite him not having finished college, he said.
He pointed to two pairs of shoes on a shelf above a women’s jeans rack and said he knew the people who designed them. He spoke joyfully about how his work connected him with small designers, whom he said he followed and messaged on Instagram.
“I guess what keeps me going is just, I think about swag every day, like, the word literally pops in my head when I wake up. And it's been like that since I was a little kid,” Kimbwala said, adding that he was glad to have a job that was in line with what he cared about.
He also said that he’d learned a lot about brands and negotiating at 2nd Street–skills that would serve him at other fashion-related jobs.
But Kimbwala acknowledged he had bigger dreams beyond retail work–of getting into designing his own clothes. “I have ideas in the works and have only been feeling more and more inspired,” he said. Beyond work, he said he was also inspired by his girlfriend, Denelis, who “makes clothes, is an environmentalist, and has the best fashion sense in the world.”
Despite these positives, he still plans to quit eventually, though not until the few people remaining from when he started the job have left, he said, because “I don't want to abandon anyone else.” He has a strong desire to be seen as dependable by his coworkers.
Side Note: He’s An Etch-A-Sketch Pro
When Kimbwala isn’t working, he said he draws daily. Recently, he has picked up Etch A Sketch-ing, which he said he practices on the train commute to and from work. “My ride's pretty long. It's like how long it takes to make something. My mom got me it for like a stocking stuffer and then I was just messing around with it and then everyone's like, ‘How do you do that?’” He’s gotten very good at it.
“I feel like if you grab like a hundred or a thousand people and like give them an etch a sketch and like make them compete, I feel like I'll stand out,” he said, proudly.
A Commitment to Sustainability
In the meantime, he takes pride in the idea that his job at 2nd Street strives to combat fast fashion, something he and his girlfriend care deeply about, he said. “With 2nd Street’s model, consumers can still consume but we are a vessel for them to do it in a way where they don’t waste the clothes they’re not using because they can sell it or donate it and they’re not aiding earth damaging industries with their shopping like they would buying something brand new,” he said.
“I hate fast fashion Like if someone brings in like some Shien, Zara, Forever 21, anything like that. I'm like, it doesn't matter what it is, I'm either gonna pass on it or price it really low. And explain to them like, ‘this was made to break. So you have to buy more and more,’” he said. It was one of the few topics he was able to articulate in intense detail, which signified his passion for the subject.
The company seems to have genuinely made an effort towards sustainability, which they advertise on their website as “sustainable shopping,” claiming that “with your support, we’re able to continuously drive the sale of gently-used clothing and reduce waste around the world.”
Any items they end up unable to sell get donated to a partner company says the site. That company, the Hand2Hand project, “will recycle the clothing to clean up oil spills in factories, while other items are resold to create job opportunities and provide clothing to those in need,” it says on 2nd Street’s website.
So maybe 2nd Street isn’t the evil corporation Kimbwala initially made it out to be, perhaps the Union Square location is just understaffed. Maybe Kimbwala is just a young man grappling with the reality of full-time retail employment for the first time in his life.
What Does Cuatli Really Want?
As a child, Kimbwala said he learned never to expect anything from his mom, given their financial situation, so he never made a Christmas list and he never asked for anything for his Birthday. He said he learned at a young age that he could avoid disappointment by avoiding expectations. Today, this has evolved into a habit of never making plans. “I associate plans with expectations and expectations with self-inflicted pain and disappointment. So yeah my plan is to keep faith in the world and stay on the path I believe is right.”
It could be said this habit has stagnated possibilities for more meaningful psychic and economic development. Maybe Kimbwala’s defense mechanism of avoiding expectations, which served to protect him as a child, is now causing him to limit himself, and maybe getting high every day isn’t helping.
“All I care about, for like, if I was to stay in one place is is the weed price not absurd and does it have swag in there,” Kimwala said, ultimately. He wants to live somewhere where his sense of style is considered important and not seen as strange, and where others care deeply about how they express themselves through fashion as well.
Kimbwala’s deep love of fashion seemed to be a point of great psychic nourishment. He admitted, “That would literally be enough to keep me at a job, that would be enough to keep me living in a place where everything else is hard.”