Courtesy of Val Zapata
Her dad encouraged her to stick with it, comparing it to his line of work: selling cars.
“My dad knows that an F-150 in Houston is going to get the most activity, whereas, you might not get that same activity in Nevada. He’s like, ‘You’re going to figure out what they want, what they don’t want, and what they will bid for,'” said Zapata. “Slowly but surely, we started making 3%, 4%, 5%, and then one day we made 15% And then one day we sold $25,000 in a day.”
Most of her sales now come from live Whatnot shows. In the beginning, she was hosting daily. She and her dad turned the game room of their family home into her studio.
“We’ve gotten a little techier now, but at the time it was just my iPad, so I could see the chat, and my iPhone, so the chat could see me,” said Zapata. “I had a little desk ring light. It was probably 15 bucks on Amazon. The backdrop was a couple of racks of sneakers.”
While her current streams are shorter one- to two-hour “power hours,” in her first few months on the platform she’d go live for multiple hours at a time. “I would wake up so fried from eight or nine hours of really high intense energy, because we bring the show, and my dad would have set the stream back up, my background would be perfect, and that was just his way of continuing to encourage me.”
After just one month on Whatnot, Zapata says she did enough in sales to quit her insurance job in September 2022.
Her company has expanded to offering streetwear and has brought in up to $500,000 in sales in a single month. BI viewed her Whatnot seller dashboard and confirmed that her business has generated over $4 million in sales so far in 2024.
Predicting a live-selling boom in the US
Zapata, who leads a team of eight employees and rents a 6,000-square-foot warehouse to store inventory, aspires to run a seven-figure monthly operation. She believes her current sales strategy can help her achieve that goal.
“Live selling has just now started. We’re at the tip of the iceberg right now,” she said. “This is a big thing in other countries. This is not a big thing in the US. It’s about to be massive. We’re going to have streams that have 10,000 viewers, and that’s going to be a small stream.”
Her advice to any online or brick-and-mortar store owner is to develop the skill of live selling. While Zapata has had success on Whatnot, there are other live-selling platforms like Bambuser, Channelize.io, Facebook Live, and YouTube Live.
She honed the skill by observing top sellers.
“If I wasn’t livestreaming I had someone on in the background — someone that I admired, someone that I liked the way that they spoke to the chat and the way they sold their sneakers,” said Zapata. “I would ask, ‘Okay, what are they doing?’ They’re doing intros, they’re interacting, they’re really getting creative with the things that they’re giving to their community. They’re taking the time to educate.”
She’s learned that sourcing good sneakers is just half the battle. She could get an incredible deal on a unique pair, but it doesn’t matter if she can’t sell them.
The more she can educate her buyers, the more successful she is.
“Holly might come on and say, ‘I love that pink sneaker,’ and bid. But if I tell Holly, not only is this a really cool pink sneaker, but this is a 2020 collectible from Kobe Bryant, Holly might be willing to pay a little bit more,” explained Zapata, who starts every product at a dollar during a live show. The highest bidder takes it home. “But if I don’t know and don’t share, then they’re just consumers bidding and trying to get a good deal. So I learned very early on that I have to bring knowledge to them.”
She also spends a lot of time reading reviews and making adjustments based on what her buyers are saying.
“When I look at my reviews every morning, I’m like, ‘This is no good. We have to fix this. We have to figure this out,'” she said, adding: “When you’re your own boss, you’re your own motivator. You lead yourself.”