Sahuaro’s own Blessing Onya, junior, has proved that it’s never too early to start pursuing your dreams, like starting your own business. In February of 2019, Blessing opened up her own Depop shop, now officially branded as RainbowThrashCo, and over a year later she has earned a whopping 5 to 6,000 dollars. If you don’t know, Depop is a service where people can sell anything from old clothes to items they’ve created themselves. To any high school teenager, this sounds like a lot of money; however, it didn’t come without a lot of hard work from Blessing.

 “I started looking into brands like Igirl and Unif as well as being referred from a close friend of mine.” These are the things that originally inspired Blessing to open her own shop. Today she mainly sells jewelry pieces, but she is starting to incorporate things like faux fur tote bags, and dead-stock clothing into her inventory as well. To find inspiration for what she can sell, she says, “When it comes to jewelry, I look at old 90’s magazines on Pinterest because it’s considered y2k inspired and I lean towards edgy, grunge, goth type jewelry.”

Blessing has established herself in the Depop community, but what comes next? Her plans for the future include creating her own pieces to use for jewelry, as opposed to going to a craft store and buying pre-made items. An even bigger goal of hers is to make a well functioning sustainable clothing and jewelry business within the next two years. In fact, she has been putting aside portions of her earnings to eventually partner with a manufacturer that will help her reach these goals.

Running a Depop shop isn’t all rainbows and butterflies, as Blessing says, “The downsides of having this shop really is taxing. Depop takes 10% of each purchase. Which may not sound bad but let’s see you make a jewelry piece that costs you overall $60 to create. When you post it you’ll sell it for $10 apiece and try to earn back that money. It’s sometimes hard, especially with both PayPal and Depop taxes.” While she says she hasn’t had any odd occurrences while using the app, “rude sellers” and “weird people” are something you can come across. She also added how, oddly enough, Depop is sometimes used as a dating app. 

If you want to create your own shop just like Blessing has, her words of advice are, “Never ever feel discouraged. Of course the first few months you won’t sell a lot, but never stop promoting yourself and believing in yourself.”

You can check out some of Blessing’s products at Rainbowthrashco on Depop and Instagram.