Q&A: Why Buy-Sell-Trade Works, Even In A Pandemic
A chic chat with the owners of New York’s OPC Buy Sell Trade.
This fall, as Fashion Weeks resume everywhere with some semblance of normalcy and we collectively emerge from a COVID world cautiously, we might have no idea what to wear. We might still be trying out our season’s new look after relying on Zoom tops and sweatpants for over a year. Because this has been a transitional, untethered time for most, when we see long-lost friends, we might bring a new baby along for introduction. We may tell stories about jobs lost and found, business ideas that came to life and chapters closed.
For three longtime New-York-based vintage sellers — Christine Costello, Pat Noecker and Jane Herships — who opened the first buy-sell-trade store in Ridgewood, Queens last year, several of these life updates will be true. Like many small businesses, they had the unfortunate timing of signing a lease on their store, Other People’s Clothes Buy Sell Trade (or OPC for short), starting February 1 of 2019. But, “resourceful” is a word that comes to mind when one thinks of vintage sellers and they’ve weathered the storm. Other People’s Clothes officially opened in August of 2020.
A little background: Noeker and Costello closed their original vintage store Feels in order to sell exclusively online and Herships runs an online and market-based business called Other People’s Clothes Vintage. Using their 20+ years of experience and culling inventory from one of the most stylish neighborhoods in New York, OPC Buy Sell Trade uses the standard model of buying, offering sellers 50% of the retail price in store credit and 30% in cash. Here’s what they learned about sellers getting savvier in the pandemic, the virtues of being nice and why Ed Hardy is worth a second look.
This interview was edited and condensed.
Interview by Sara Graham.
SG: So, I wanted to hear about you opening a brick-and-mortar — as I understand it — right before everything hit and how it’s been over the last year. I feel like there’s been a huge interest in second-hand and vintage with online selling that’s happened while everyone’s been attached to their phones via TikTok…
CC: Everyone opened a Depop.
SG: Everybody, including myself.
CC: Really. Over the Covid year everybody opened a Depop and it sort of made everyone feel like they knew something new about resale, which they did, in a way. That’s something I learned. Everybody was way more savvy. I worked for Beacon’s Closet for 13 years and there wasn’t that type of option. So that’s interesting.
SG: So, when did your lease start?
PN: So, the lease started basically February 1 of 2019.
CN/SG: 2020!
PN: 2020. Sorry, my years are all messed up.
SG: I know, what year is it? Nobody knows.
PN: And then the pandemic hits. We were supposed to be open by April. We were supposed to be open by April 1st. [The landlord] gave us two-month abatement and, you know, we called them and were just like, “there’s no way this is happening — our construction people have to stop working…it’s impossible.”
CC: Right ’cause our other store Feels closed like mid-March and obviously everything closed.
PN: So, they were like, “we’re not gonna charge you any rent until you can open.” So we opened in August.
CC: The very final weekend of August because rent was due September 1st.
SG: So, did you want to open a brick-and-mortar in 2019 when you were thinking about it because you enjoyed running Feels, it had some success and you didn’t want to be an online retailer?
PN: Yeah, we wanted a second business because this guy [the baby] was on the way.
CC: Yeah, and it was a clear demand. And Feels was the smallest store ever. We tried a couple times buying from people and you really do need a lot of space. And it was so clean and bright and shiny and buying clothes from the public is kind of a dirty job and you need space. So, we never anticipated Feels closing, it wasn’t something we wanted and Jane’s got lots of irons in the fire. So, everybody is still doing other types of work, this is also all of our lives now. It was really just a neighborhood demand. Pat and I had talked about opening a buy-sell-trade before, but it became really clear and we needed help and Jane was exactly the right person.
PN: Plus, Jane has skills that Christine and I don’t have. And Jane’s polite to people.
CC: Most of the time, most of the time [laughs].
JH: [laughs] I’m a little frank now and then.
PN: That’s the thing though we want to be nice to people, you know? We don’t want to operate like a sort of jaded, angry like, retail person.
SG: Tell me more about that in the culture of buy-sell-trade, because I know what you’re talking about.
PN: Yeah.
CC: Can I speak to that? I mean, I came from that and I know very much that I wasn’t wonderful in my ’20s and I know a lot of buy-sell-trades do have a reputation for people feeling uncomfortable or judged and it is often uncomfortable to bring your clothing to have somebody else assess it because it feels like you’re personally being judged and one of the things that we’ve told our staff and we’ve had a conversation among all of us, which is that you need to be nice.
There’s no brand that isn’t good enough, there’s no size that doesn’t work. To make sure that we never say something like, “we don’t take these things.” […] So being nice is…you know it’s just clothing. Americans have way too much clothing and they don’t know what to do with it and nobody should ever be in a position where they feel like, lesser than or less cool or anything like that. So, the whole motto is “buy-sell-trade with a smile” and we really mean it and it’s a conversation that continuously happens with staff and each of us.
SG: So, I’m curious about people in hibernation [in quarantine]. I, myself, was combing through all my closets and I had a ton of things to donate. So, what was it like — was it raining inventory once you did open?
PN: It still kind of is.
CC: We were seeing — because people were opening their Depops. People really did have bags of stuff that they knew didn’t work, they were also way more savvy through the pandemic and had become more savvy about what they could get for retail.
SG: Interesting.
CC: Which was interesting and has made things interesting. And I don’t ever think we’ve been totally flooded but people really did realize what they didn’t need. And everybody that would sell would make some mention of that and people really were paring down because we just found ourselves feeling like “well, I just work from home now.” And it was so funny because I’d see all these same people from Feels where it was kind of like…with their longer hair and their roots grown out. All these people who always looked impeccable — they still looked great but everybody had gone through this stage and was wearing the same kind of thing. So, that was neat — there was a lot of conversation about “what do I really need?”
PN: A funny thing I’ve heard a lot is people selling their stuff and then coming to get cash, and being like “yeah in the pandemic, I put on a few too many pounds.”
SG: People’s bodies have changed!
CC: Then another flip happened, so we got through those dark months, September, October, December, man, and those are hard months. In retail, once you hit the winter those are slow months anyway and especially slow in a pandemic and we weathered that and we have a good team and then when things really did start reopening, everybody needed clothes. There was more of a fever from people who decided like “Wow, I have all of these clothes that I really don’t need and I can pare down because I’m working from home, this is a new reality, or new normal” and then the flip happened where people were like “Oh my God, I have no clothes and I just want to shop.” So spring saw this new awakening.
SG: So do you feel like buy-sell-trade, it feels like, in a recession, it has two-part service to the community? A: you’re offering a model where people can make money [by selling] and also people are able to shop for things cheaper than retail….
JH: That’s actually a good point. I did notice that right at first, people weren’t working. People needed money.
PN: That’s absolutely true.
JH: People were coming in and getting money. People wanted the cash. I’m not saying they wouldn’t have taken the store credit in other times, but it’s a way for people to make a little bit of money.
SG: What are some great things that have come in? I’m always curious.
JH: Oh my God, so many.
PN: It is like unearthing closets of this neighborhood. It’s amazing. Were the first buy-sell-trade clothing store in this neighborhood and Queens is sort of an American Graffiti-type neighborhood, so there’s been some incredible vintage buys for sure.
JH: And contemporary brands — it’s a very stylish neighborhood.
PN: Absolutely.
SG: Are most people coming here to sell from the neighborhood?
CC: Generally, yes. Because everyone has to fill out their address, I would say 90% of people selling are local […] Jane lives in the neighborhood and we’re just a mile away. We’re technically on the Bushwick border.
JH: What do they call it now?
CC: Bushwood. We definitely see Prada, we were seeing a lot Ganni for awhile, which is exciting. Issey Miyaki, Yohji Yamamoto — we’re seeing all the big hitters, which is awesome. And then seeing incredible vintage. Y2K is so in, so one of the funny things is Ed Hardy. It’s funny, the manager who is a good old friend of Jane’s and I are the same age, and also through my experience at Beacon’s, I remember when we would pass on that Ed Hardy stuff all the time, it was not cool. But we have all these 25-year-olds, like if we had not asked them I would’ve passed on Ed Hardy 1,000 times over and it was them, it was those young people who were like “Oh, no. Ed Hardy is in.”
JH: Jordan [an employee] just now was like, we sell on our Instagram, selling this Goosebumps T-shirt. I wouldn’t have known that. It sold right away.
CC: I’m really good at the Y2K thing, but the Ed Hardy…
JH: No clue.
SG: Are they [employees] also buying?
CC: Oh yeah, they’re all buying, everybody who works here is also a tastemaker because they’re buying in. Because the process is so subjective. So, part of it is also getting people to say “we” a lot — using that “royal we,” so it’s never like, while it is subjective, but you never want to say “I can’t take this.” We want to be “buy positive,” too. I tell people that all the time. We want to take more than we want to say no to. We want to try it. I’d rather you guys take a risk than say no.
PN: Can I just add something to that? What’s really great about this business is that I used to work at the Strand, which is also a buy-sell-trade, and for New York City, the buy-sell-trade model still works incredibly well because of the sophisticated population of New York City.
CC: It works everywhere, though.
PN: And also, it’s a brick-and-mortar thing but it functions like the internet where you have user-generated content. And it’s a sort of a retro-futurist blend where art meets upcycling and commerce and it’s just super-fun as a concept for business.
