Meet Shannon Jean, the Entrepreneur Who Made Millions on the Liquidation Circuit

Influencers have built followings cooking with Costco ingredients, unboxing toys, sniffing candles and cleaning on camera. This story is about a man thousands look to for information about liquidation sales.

Meet Shannon Jean, a 59-year-old California resident who has made a career of trawling auctions and liquidation sales for merchandise and then reselling his finds, bringing in millions in sales and profit along the way. He regales his nearly 40,000 followers on X—”Auctions and liquidations are my playground,” his bio reads—with information about oddities that are up for auction online, posting about items ranging from a massive supercomputer to high-end door hinges.

Jean’s path to millions of dollars in sales started with a college landscaping business—and ultimately put his kids through school. Jean has built enough rapport with suppliers to be among the first they call with excess inventory, and he’s hawked everything from computer parts to sports jerseys. These days, he spends much of his time advising others, focusing his sales efforts on small, high-end items.

“We’re cleaning up the inefficiencies in the marketplace,” Jean told Investopedia. His trade, he explains, is in products that “didn’t find a home, didn’t sell the way either the manufacturer or the retailer thought they might or somebody–a buyer–bought too much,” he said, “There’s people like me that go in and fix it.”

‘I Moved My Way Up the Food Chain’

Jean is one of a growing number of people who depend on the returns industry—the National Retail Federation estimates its value at $890 billion—for their livelihoods.

His handbag business, Rebound Fashion, got off the ground in 2018 when he connected with Macy’s liquidation division about excess purses. He bought a few and spent months studying how others sold similar pieces on social commerce sites. Jean moved from flipping cheap models to bags that cost thousands of dollars. Cruise-ship operators eached out when the pandemic hit and they no longer had travelers coming aboard their ships and buying high-end goods from their boutiques. 

“I built my credibility,” said Jean. “I moved my way up the food chain.”

By the time Jean stepped away from Rebound Fashion, it had done $3.7 million in sales in about three years, he said.

Jean got into watch reselling years earlier when a contact reached out with excess merchandise, sending him hundreds of thousands of dollars a week in returned watches. He soon realized he couldn’t address customers’ technical concerns, such as an altimeter not correctly detecting the altitude aboard a flight, so he found a partner with mechanical and industry know-how by asking around in New York City’s Diamond District. 

They’ve since sold $15 million in watches, Jean said. He still receives, sorts and inspects watches for his partner, but the volume they handle has decreased in recent years.

A College Gig Comes Full-Circle

Jean started reselling in college when, while running a landscaping business, he noticed equipment at an auction was selling for slightly more than he was paying to rent it. So he started buying what he needed, and reselling trucks, tractors and cranes in other regions. 

In the early 90s, Jean traveled the country scooping up Apple computers, monitors and printers from retailers with excess inventory and corporations in the midst of shutdowns. Jean experimented with selling parts and entire products, and built a few businesses around repairing and supplying technology to other businesses. 

He learned how to work with vendors worried about their relationship with suppliers and brands, agreeing not to list items on eBay, sell them abroad or, in one case, bring merchandise west of the Mississippi River. Although there are few legal restrictions on how he offloaded items, Jean found that accommodating partners’ requests built rapport and led to future deals.

He experimented with e-commerce in the sector’s early days. Jean and his wife placed a successful, $28,000 bid at a liquidation auction for 18,000 sports jerseys from the e-retailer Woot. They paid $1.25 a pop for jerseys that normally retail for $100 to $130, Jean said, and resold them to sporting-goods shops, comic book and collectible stores and online buyers.

Jean said he learned that “if you were good at finding the right deal, it kind of sold itself.”