Forget pen pals. Depop wants to create kindred closets, pairing strangers across continents through a shared sense of style.
Created in partnership with Uncommon Creative Studio, the resale platform’s latest campaign hinges on the concept of Depop-elgangers—what the wholly-owned Etsy subsidiary defined as “two people, worlds apart, brought together by a shared sense of style.”
“When someone buys your item on Depop, they’re doing more than shopping; they’re validating your taste,” said Sonia Biddle, Depop’s interim chief product officer and marketing leader. “This campaign is about celebrating that human connection when someone sees your listing and thinks, ‘That’s the one for me.’”
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The quasi-surrealistic campaign brings that emotional exchange to, well, everywhere. The London brand’s full-scale media rollout spans out-of-home (OOH), streaming radio (Spotify, SiriusXM) and connected television providers (Disney, Amazon, Roku, Netflix, YouTube TV) as well as paid social across TikTok, Meta (Instagram, Facebook) and Pinterest.
The collaborators tapped into “the quiet thrill of being seen,” the resale platform said of “that universal feeling when someone likes what you like.”
“Early into concepting, we came across a social post where someone who sold a sweater on Depop saw the person she sold it to, five years later at a bar in Manhattan,” said Kelley Barrett, creative director at Uncommon. “The comments were all like, ‘OMG, this is fate, what are the odds, this happened for a reason.’”
This spurred the thought of having a Depopelganger—what Uncommon creative director Katie DiNardo said is someone you become inextricably linked to by a singular piece of clothing on the platform.
“Dramatic, yes, but also true,” DiNardo continued. “From there, we wanted this notion to inform everything, to really dramatize the feeling of someone vibing with your style and how personal that is.”
Dramatic? Sure. Backed by data? Yes. Powered by a community of over 45 million registered users—Soko Media tallied 5 million active buyers and 2.5 million active sellers as of the first half of 2025—Depop released research, in partnership with the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), that demonstrates how secondhand shopping on Depop “displaces” the purchase of brand-new items.
“For us, the displacement rate is more than just a metric,” said Depop head of sustainability Cathy Moscardini in the report. “It ensures that the positive environmental impact of every secondhand purchase is grounded in data that everyone can trust.”
In March, the UK-based global environmental action NGO dropped a methodology that calculates “the rate at which acquiring (e.g. buying or renting) or repairing an item through a circular business model directly displaces the purchase of a new garment in the existing, linear system.”
The shared methodology found that, globally, over 3-in-5 purchases made on Depop displace the purchase of a brand-new item elsewhere. The displacement rate stood at 68 percent in the UK, 64 percent in the U.S. and 72 percent in Australia.
Reselling fast fashion equally contributes to that breakdown, too.
Lasering-in on the resale of fast fashion on Depop specifically, those rates didn’t move much: 69 percent in the UK, 63 percent in the U.S. and 74 percent in Australia—indicating that the platform encourages both fast fashion and non-fast fashion consumers to go secondhand, the company said.
“Our adoption of this shared methodology reaffirms our commitment to impact and transparency—and provides our community and the wider industry with credible data that we can all use to drive meaningful change,” Moscardini said.
The Depopelgangers campaign launched Sept. 2 nationwide.
