How I turned thrifting side hustle into full-time work
Jocelyn Elizabeth was a new mother working part-time as a marketing executive when her father brought home a $5 lamp from a churchyard sale in Dillsburg, Pennsylvania.
Elizabeth says it’s 2011. Although the lamp wasn’t particularly stylish or new, his father was confident he had made a good investment and found a sanitized version of the same lamp listed on eBay for $70. Elizabeth says she immediately went thrifting the next weekend, intending to turn her finds into a profit online, with her baby son following behind in a stroller.
Elizabeth, who uses her middle name professionally and asked not to share her last name, now makes a full-time living from her savings-focused YouTube channel. Crazy Lamp Lady and its online savings marketplace NikNaxhe says. NikNax is home to more than 5,000 sellers listing a variety of retail items, from mugs and glassware to jewelry, books, trading cards and local snacks.
NikNax had more than $5.2 million in revenue in 2025 as of Oct. 31, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. Elizabeth, 37, gets a 5% cut of each sale, meaning she’s made at least $260,000 from the market so far this year. District, the online platform that hosts NikNax, also takes a 5% cut of every sale.
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Elizabeth also sells her own second-hand items on NikNax and says her store is responsible for about 5% of NikNax’s total sales. According to the documents, the YouTube channel generated approximately $298,000 in advertising revenue in 2025 as of October 15.
Elizabeth says both NikNax and the YouTube channel are profitable. He adds that he employs two other people to help list and ship second-hand finds. He works about three days a week at NikNax and two or three days on the YouTube channel, and he says his work hours vary significantly.
“These days I spend between 50 and 100 hours a week working. It really depends on what’s going on. Some weeks I take more thrifty trips, other weeks I focus on selling,” says mother-of-three Elizabeth. “NikNax has become such a big part of my daily life that even when I’m not actively selling, I’m often watching other shows, chatting, or listing products. It technically works, but most of it feels like part of my daily routine.”
Here’s how he created his side hustle on his YouTube channel and turned thrifting into his full-time job.
‘It was definitely risky’
When she first discovered thrifting in 2011, Elizabeth was making $14 an hour at a part-time corporate marketing job, she says. He soon began visiting antique shows and stores across the United States, perusing the vintage and collectible secondary market and browsing for items with higher resale value.
By April 2016, she says, she felt inadequate sending marketing emails to her customers every day, so she decided to start a YouTube channel dedicated to her frugality.. He says his first inkling that this could be a real money-making business was when he made $600 in ad revenue in one day for the first time.
“I pulled over and said, ‘What the hell is going on?'” Elizabeth said. “I remember asking,” he says.
By the end of 2018, Elizabeth was “consistently making more from my part-time job from YouTube,” she says, so she quit her marketing job that December. “I said, ‘You know what? I don’t want to be here anymore’… It was definitely risky and scary.”
About six months later, Elizabeth had a house full of antiques and five employees; two were people who listed items on eBay and three were people who packaged and shipped them. Elizabeth says she hired three more employees during the Covid-19 pandemic. Declining advertising revenue pushed him to sell more on eBay. He also says that he is not satisfied with the seller fees on the platform.
In October 2023, he launched a marketplace on District, an internet platform founded in 2022, after being invited by a company representative who saw his YouTube channel. There are currently 98 marketplaces in the region. websiteIncluding NikNax.
Elizabeth also rents a commercial space to store her own second-hand items and a separate workspace for day-to-day responsibilities such as listing and shipping orders. The total cost of these spaces, including utilities, is about $2,000 to $3,000 per month, he says.
Challenges of owning a marketplace
Elizabeth says owning a marketplace rather than just being a seller presents new challenges. Online trends change rapidly and it can be difficult to stay on top of them. Livestream sales, where you sell items in real time to buyers who are actively watching your live video stream, are a major sales driver for NikNax, but Elizabeth says she wasn’t initially comfortable in front of a live camera.
It’s also responsible for enforcing the platform’s rules, such as removing people who leave rude comments or determining whether a buyer falsely claimed that an item was not shipped in order to illegally obtain a refund.
On the other hand, he says it’s pretty easy to build a community of buyers and sellers: He brought some of his YouTube audience with him, and now publishes many of his NikNax livestreams on YouTube and other social channels to market the platform.
Elizabeth used some of her earnings to invest in real estate, purchasing an Airbnb rental property and a separate rental home in Pennsylvania. Each three-bedroom home costs about $300,000, he says. Airbnb charges guests around $300 per night, including fees, according to the rental platform.
As long as you have the “tenacity” and determination, anyone from thrift to YouTube to NikNax can replicate his experience to a certain degree, he says. He says he travels the country at least once a month to find second-hand items to transform, while also filming and editing online content and livestreaming several times a week.
However, he notes that even if you only have a few dollars in your pocket, you can turn it into a profit if you know what to look for.
“I think anyone can do this if it works,” says Elizabeth. “Anyone can go to Goodwill and buy something and say, ‘Oh my God, how much is this worth?’ one might think. And find out it’s worth $50… If you’re willing to work, if you’re willing to learn, I think anyone can really achieve this.”
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