A teenager who dropped out of school at 16 turned his Vinted hobby into a six-figure resale business that lets him travel all over the world.
Leon Scott, now 18, said he has ‘never looked back’ after making more than £500,000 in revenue from selling pre-owned clothes, allowing him to holiday in Singapore, Thailand, and take his grandmother to Amsterdam.
Leon, who lives in Ayr, Scotland, said he started selling sweets in the school playground from age 13 and progressed to pre-owned clothes through Vinted and eBay within a year, making around £25 a week.
By the time he was 16, Leon said he was earning up to £3,000 a month in revenue while still at school, before he decided to ‘take a leap of faith’ and leave to pursue his business.
In early 2024, Leon started using a live-streaming auction app called Tilt and said he made £25,000 that year, before this grew to £560,000 in 2025.
So far in 2026, Leon said it is ‘coming up to £400,000 in sales’, and his operation has gone from using his grandmother’s spare room for his stock to securing his own 3,000-square-foot unit.
Looking back on leaving education to pursue his business, Leon said: ‘I couldn’t be happier with my decision.
‘Just the thought of being trapped away in a college or university or even in an office, and then working for someone else … I like the freedom that I’ve got.
‘Honestly, I can do whatever I want at this point in time.’
Leon Scott, now 18, said he has ‘never looked back’ after making more than £500,000 in revenue from selling pre-owned clothes
In early 2024, Leon started using a live-streaming auction app called Tilt and said he made £25,000 that year, before this grew to £560,000 in 2025. He is seen here on holiday
After Leon developed a side hustle for selling sweets to fellow pupils in the playground, it progressed to pre-owned clothes, both to his friends and online.
Leon said he would spend around £10 of his £25 pocket money each week to buy clothes – such as a pre-owned designer shirt from Moschino, Alexander McQueen or Versace.
He added: ‘Any of the money I got from selling them, I would just buy more again.’
Leon said he was ‘amassing more and more’ to the point where he had a rail of clothes along the wall of his bedroom and a ‘big pile of shoes’ in the corner.
Leon said he might buy a pair of shoes for £10 or £15 and then sell them for anywhere up to £40, making sure to explain how big the discount was from the original recommended retail price.
He got his stock from friends, reselling sites like Vinted and eBay, and even tried car boot sales, but the latter was not very practical as a teenager who had to catch the bus to them.
In these early days, Leon would make an average revenue of around £25 a week and said this was ‘quite stable’.
He added: ‘I was reinvesting every penny so my stock was accumulating.’
Within two years, Leon was selling around £2,000 worth of stock each month, all while still going to school.
Then, at the beginning of 2024, Leon said a representative from an app called Tilt got in touch with him and asked if he would like to be a live streamer.
Leon said the stock in his bedroom had accumulated so much that ‘there was a little strip’ in front of his bed for him to walk through
Now he rents out a 3,000-square-foot unit where he keeps his stock
Tilt is a live shopping and auction app where people sell products in real time, enabling AI to help match buyers to relevant streams as they happen.
Leon said he previously did some live-streaming of video games when he was 12, so he had some experience in it, but he was still ‘a bit nervous’.
He said he ended up making £65 over the course of an hour during his first live-streamed auction, so he decided to ‘make the switch’.
Leon said: ‘I could sell to anyone through the phone, instead of them just seeing pictures of a listing and having to get the item that way.’
From that point, Leon said he ‘pretty much streamed every day’ he could, outside school hours.
He said: ‘There were some nights where I’d be on my phone and I would just put up a live-stream.
‘There’d be 10 to 15 people, and I would speak to them and sell them a couple things.
‘Then I’d go to bed and go to school the next morning,’ he added.
But Leon began to lose interest in school, explaining: ‘I was listening to a business professor that I didn’t really think was telling me anything useful.’
Leon said he ended up going to college for a year after his parents asked him to try it, but he decided to drop out ‘three-quarters of the way through it’.
Leon said: ‘I’d realised I didn’t want to do any sort of normal job and I don’t really want someone to tell me my hours.
‘From then on, I’ve never really looked back and I’ve just trusted myself.’
This year alone, Leon said he has already turned over almost £400,000 from his pre-owned clothes business
By the time Leon dropped out of college in March 2024, his sales were up to £3,000 a month and a total of £25,000 in 2024.
Once he left, Leon could devote more time to selling online, and he said he ended up making a total of £560,000 in sales in 2025.
This year alone, Leon said he has already turned over almost £400,000.
Leon said the stock in his bedroom had accumulated so much that ‘there was a little strip’ in front of his bed for him to walk through, so he asked his grandmother who lives next door if he could use her spare room.
But within a year, Leon needed even more room, so he rented out a 3,000-square-foot unit.
A typical day for Leon will start with him waking up late in the morning or early afternoon, packing the orders sold from the night before, then by 9pm, he said he will ‘boot up a live-stream and end up selling’.
Every item starts at £1 and they are 15-second auctions, so Leon said it is ‘pretty fast-paced’ selling ‘anywhere from 30 to 60 items an hour’.
The biggest ticketed item Leon ever sold was a new with tags designer Moncler jacket for £780, but said that most of his items are pre-owned.
Leon said a typical live-stream might last ‘two or three’ hours, but a weekend stream can be up to seven hours of ‘non-stop screaming at a camera’ that he gets through with ‘a lot of coffee’.
The first holiday Leon went on with the profits from his reselling business was with his grandmother to Amsterdam as a way to thank her for letting him use her spare room for his stock.
Leon said: ‘We went on a nice little canal tour.
‘We went round to all the bars and strolled down a few streets with my gran, so I don’t know how that sounds when I say it out loud!’
Leon has also been on holiday with his friends, including trips to Singapore, Thailand, the Canaries, and a further trip to Vietnam planned for this year.
For anyone looking to get started in their own reselling business, Leon said: ‘It’s all just consistency and putting your head down for long enough until it works.
‘I feel like people should know that there’s a lot more out there than getting a typical job.’
