Will Trade Vintage for Soup
How to connect with other people who are also obsessed with vintage
I love soup.
I love corn chowder, I love miso soup, I love chili (with beans!), I love tom kha kai, I love tomato bisque from a can. I stop into my neighborhood market at least a couple of times a week, and the vendors there that know me best are at the bakery and the soup stall, Chomps-Élysées.
Tiffany of Chomps became the Lower East Side’s resident Soup Slinger a few years ago, and I’ve been a regular patron ever since. Last month, she stopped into the vintage store to browse my selection, and fell in love with a kitschy blue matchstick-print silk Fendi scarf I sourced in Rome. She tagged me in a post lamenting leaving the scarf behind, so I responded with an offer: “Trade?”
And so that wonderful little scarf has found a loving new home, and I’m now the proud haver of soup-and-bread IOUs. Tiffany and her team make an excellent focaccia.
The exchange has warmed me in more ways than one. There’s the literal hot soup, of course, but I’m thinking more about the whole human connection thing. Why aren’t more of us bartering? Why are we all spending so much time running around buying things and eating things and never stopping to think about how, or why, or who?
This summer, Emily Stochl published the results of her Secondhand Sellers Income Survey. I wasn’t surprised by most of the numbers, but there was one thing that’s really stuck with me: the solitude of the vintage industry. 90.5% of surveyed dealers work alone, and 65% never discuss pricing or salary with their peers.
Turns out, sellers that participate in collectives have a big advantage. As part of the Seven Wonders Collective here in NYC, I already feel lucky for the support. But I realized that there’s a big advantage of the collective that goes under the radar: our shop Slack server. While the main purpose of it for communication about sales and shopkeeping, it inevitably gets used for all kinds of other things. Does anyone have a black gown I could buy for a wedding tomorrow? Best dry cleaner in South Brooklyn? Has anyone here ever done this market before? Come to my pop up this weekend!
Having this (digital) communal space has completely changed how I do business. It’s so much more intimate than a questions box or a poll on an Instagram story, and it’s a million times more efficient than a dozen separate DMs or group chats. But at the end of the day, our Slack is for work. It’s a core part of store operations, and it wouldn’t make sense to open it up to people outside of the collective.
My husband has been telling me to start a vintage Discord server for years now. Turns out when you marry someone very smart, you have to frequently acquiesce to their very logical and helpful suggestions. I pushed back for a bunch of reasons - Discord is so… male. Nobody wants to download another app. What if I start the server and nobody joins?
Turns out, it’s a really good idea, and none of that stuff actually matters. I believe that we’re seriously lacking communal spaces for discussions around vintage and the vintage industry, so why can’t I just make one? For those of you that are unfamiliar, Discord is an that’s a lot like Slack, just less corporate and more… nerdy, tbh. It’s a digital group chat sequestered into its own platform, so you can have all of the benefits of an enormous chat room without one million text notifications.
The 1-800-VINTAGE Discord server is open to everyone. It will be primarily focused on vintage, but will naturally include the many offshoots of our particular shared interested - sustainability, small business, mending, laundry, styling, etc.
I’ve created a handful of channels to get things started, with plans to edit those spaces once the best uses of the server really start to take shape. I’m launching with the following channels to give you an idea of what you can use the chat for: Sourcing Requests, ID (identification), Recommendations, Events, Fix It (laundry, mending, tailoring), and Bragging. There’s a Warning channel where people can share about negative experiences they’ve had within the industry to protect others - scams, theft, unfair chargebacks, abusive customers. There’s also a separate section for Selling, where people can try and rehome their vintage and secondhand items directly with other users in our community.
And, getting back to the soup of it all, there’s a Bartering channel!
There is also a private section only for professional dealers - just ask me to be verified and added! This will be the place to have transparent conversations amongst dealers about our industry. There’s so much unnecessary secrecy in vintage, especially around money - how much are we spending on booth fees for different events and markets? How much rent are collectives and shops charging? This will also act as a place for support and advice with seller’s platform issues, customer disputes, and other frustrating problems most of us deal with in isolation.
I’m launching the server with a dedicated NYC channel for those of you that are also here in my city. The location-specific channel will primarily be to announce local events like pop-ups, markets, and parties, and to ask for locally specific recommendations. As the server grows, I’m hoping to add channels for additional locations.
This space will only live up to its potential if people participate, so please join me! Discord invitation links only stay active for seven days, so feel free to message me for a fresh link if you’re seeing this after 10/26. See you on Discord!!!!