‘Like an in real life Poshmark’: How downtown Las Vegas’ Republic Goods runs itself

Las Vegas native Noel Hurst has gone from Zappos director to startup founder to, now, small business owner, all with another full-time job and three children.

The owner of Republic Goods, a seller-run consignment store which opened in downtown Las Vegas in March, said the secret to balancing it all is making her business run itself.

“The goal of Republic Goods is to make buying and selling secondhand goods easy for the average person,” said Hurst. “We like to say, ‘it’s like an in real life Poshmark.’”

How it works

Sellers reserve a date and booth for $35 using the shop’s digital calendar, pick up their tags in-store, price their items themselves and then set up their space at 9 a.m. on Saturdays. Influencers and industry insiders, like retail workers, get a free booth.

Almost anything goes when selling, except electronics, food, skin care and makeup items are off limits.

From there, Republic Goods handles the rest. The shop takes a third of the profits and sends a payout to sellers at the end of the week. Typically, the average payout is around $120, but Hurst said she has done payouts of over $1,000 to sellers.

Currently, they have 79 individual sellers at Republic Goods, while mostly clothes and accessories are on sale, there are some home goods retailers as well.

Hurst had seen the consignment model in the U.S. coming out of Utah and thought, “that’s so genius,” and opened her own store to be a place where she wanted to shop.

“The customers, brands and price people are willing to pay are different,” said Hurst. “I would say our customer is anywhere between 25 and older and understands what they like. They like brands like Free People, Zara, Levi’s and designer goods.”

Princess Purnell has two booths at Republic Goods. Since she started in May, she said she makes around $600 per month and is one of the top sellers at the store.

“It’s been an awesome way for me to clear out my closet, and also, kind of just store some extra income on the side,” said Purnell. “I literally just was like, ‘Oh, let me just try this out really quickly.’ But, now I love it.”

Purnell stocks her booth with anything she or her two kids don’t wear anymore, accessories and seasonal items. For example, when the Backstreet Boys announced their residency, she made sure to stock some all-white items.

But, the main thing she says goes the fastest is vintage, which Hurst agrees with.

“Vintage, cool pieces, break every pricing rule and every seasonal rule,” said Hurst. “You could sell a vintage T-shirt from the ‘70s for like, $150-$200.”

Republic Goods has been “a blessing in disguise” for Purnell, who has tried other consignment stores and resale sites, but said they were too “nit picky.”

“This is great, because you really get to pick and choose what you want to sell, and you get to price it, knowing that the store is going to take a cut,” said Purnell.

Big business to small business

Just four months in and the business already runs itself, Hurst said. With her background in e-commerce from her years at Zappos, the business is “semi-automated,” with most of their systems running without her help.

“The store literally runs almost 100 percent without me,” she said. “I think I work 30 minutes a week to do the payouts, because I have to do them on Venmo, which is on the list of things I’m trying to automate.”

Hurst was working at a Hilton property in 2006, reading contemporary business books on her lunch break when she heard about Zappos. She said, “it sounded like fiction.”

“They did a lot of things that probably now just seem like common sense,” said Hurst. “Like treating customers right, or making more of like a flat organization (meaning no middle management), treating people well, having diversity and inclusion. It was just like the books.”

She started as a buyer with the company that same year and worked “1,000 different jobs” within the company, eventually working her way up to senior business process architect when she left the company in 2020.

But the most impressive thing she did, according to her, was help build 6pm.com, Zappos discount retail division, into a billion-dollar business.

“To work at Zappos — it was amazing, and a lot of us stayed there because we just genuinely loved it,” said Hurst. “A lot of the things that we did at the time were revolutionary that are now very common. Like, standard free shipping, free return shipping, free fast shipping.”

She felt the environment at Zappos was “high trust,” something she has carried on to her own business, because she felt people “do way more than you ever ask of them, because they feel valued and respected.”

In 2019, she was tapped by Tony Hsieh, Zappos founder and CEO, to run The Knowledge Society, a Toronto-based 10-month accelerator program for 13 to 17-year-olds to learn about emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and blockchain.

In January 2021, she left her post as Las Vegas director of TKS to start her own startup: Alt Casa. The goal was to allow people to own fractions of homes, so they can live anywhere in the world and build generational wealth, she said, but it was short-lived.

She went on to work for Codingscape for next year, where some other former Zappos employees work. She still works there full time.

But the most important thing she took from the e-commerce giant was the value of people.

“I used a lot of my Zappos know how to pick the right people, make the right culture, core values, employee handbook, all the things,” said Hurst. “I left for two weeks, and my manager left for two weeks. That’s like a big testament to picking the right people.”

At Republic Goods, Hurst can often be found in her back office doing work for Codingscape or just wandering the aisles of the business, simply for love of the game.

Contact Emerson Drewes at edrewes@reviewjournal.com. Follow @EmersonDrewes on X.