Woman Is On A Mission To Trade A Bobby Pin Until She Gets A House, And Here Are Her Trades So Far

In 2005, Canadian blogger Kyle MacDonald hit the headlines by bartering up his single red paperclip into a two-story farmhouse over the course of 14 transactions. Inspired by the successful quest, 29-year-old Demi Skipper from San Francisco has set out on a journey to repeat history.

With a single bobby pin in her account, Demi intends “to make one trade at a time, starting with a bobby pin and ending with a house.” As crazy as it sounds, she has already made a fair amount of solid transactions and is nowhere near about to slow down.

Since Demi launched her Trade Me Project account on TikTok, which follows her through what looks like the coolest project to have hit the media during the pandemic season, it has already amassed 3.8M followers and 24.7M likes. Let’s take a look at how she has been doing so far and it may well change the way we look at a lonely hair clip nestled in a sofa crack forever.

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Demi, who works for a restaurant reservation app and runs a wedding dress rental business, claims that she has been a natural born hustler her whole life. It was just natural for her to put her negotiating skills to the test with the Trade Me Project experiment.

But as simple as it looks, the trades often take hours of preparation before the transaction is sealed. “Everybody just sees the TikTok video and the videos are just a minute. And what they're not seeing is hours and hours of research that's going into this," Demi told Good Morning America.

Demi is as determined as ever. It’s not a question of whether she gets her house, but rather when it’s gonna happen. “I am in go-mode until I get the house,” she claims.

For everyone who thinks the 29-year-old has gone mad, Demi reminds us of Kyle MacDonald’s famous bartering quest called “The One Red Paperclip Project.” “If you think I am crazy, in 2006, someone traded a red paperclip up until they got a house, so let's do it,” said Demi in one of her videos.

The bartering trick has long been known in popular culture and folklore. For example, the Japanese Buddhist legend of the "Straw Millionaire" follows the journey of a poor man who becomes wealthy through a series of successive trades, starting from just a single piece of straw.