Today we’d like to introduce you to Erin Kellgren.
Erin, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
The way I got here was by no means a straight line.
I grew up with an artistic sensibility and a deep love of beauty and craft. As a kid, I split time between Northern and Southern California and experienced the full range of the California landscape, style, lifestyle, and culture which deeply effected my aesthetic. I’ve always loved working with my hands and my childhood was spent on art projects. Along with my artistic side I had an entrepreneurial spirit, a love for envisioning and making things, and a strong work ethic that came from my parents’ mid-western values.
Around age nine, expressing myself through fashion became really important to me. I bought my own clothes at that age and discovered the value of thrifting early on by learning how to find amazing bargains. By the time I was in junior high, thrifting and vintage shopping were a way of life and I found my own style through creativity and inventiveness which developed and honed my eye. I started sewing around this time as well, made a lot of my own clothes, and got comfortable altering garments to whatever vision I had for them.
Despite my innate connection to fashion and visual arts, I sort of relegated these things to being hobbies. It wasn’t until I took a painting class my senior year at UCSB that I started to really value my artistic nature. This changed the course of my education. I left UCSB, spent a few months putting together a portfolio, applied and was accepted to The San Francisco Art Institute, and ultimately graduated from there with a BFA in painting. All the while I was living on an artist’s budget and had an artist’s eye for design and detail. I found I was really gifted at finding and creating beauty for very little money.
After art school, I stayed in San Francisco, showed my work in a gallery, and then started a small clothing company with a friend designing and hand-printing graphic t-shirts. Within a few years we were selling to a hundred boutiques in the US, including Fred Segal. By that time I was living in LA and was completely burned out and I had my first child which drastically shifted my priorities. I took some time off and worked on a few interior design projects, did commercial wardrobe for a bit, worked for clothing designers, an art advisor, and then some opportunities came up in entertainment – one with a documentary filmmaker, and then I spent a few years working at Topple, Jill Soloway’s production company.
When my production job wound up, a few perfectly aligned events led me to the space where I opened the store. When I saw the building, I knew this place was the next step for me. It’s a really unique property with a charming courtyard right in the heart of Silver Lake. Once I decided to open the store, I worked like crazy and opened the doors three weeks later (in November 2017). Until this point, I hadn’t worked a day in retail but my experience working with my hands, confidence with visualizing and interior design, and 30 years of experience thrifting and vintage shopping brought the store to life. I installed every shelf, hung every rack, and curated a collection that supplemented the 150 vintage dresses I had collected years previous. Since opening, I’ve been blown away by the huge volume of resale that’s available and have learned a ton about consumer behavior and motivation when it comes to resale purchases.
Being in the store for the past 2.5 years inspired an idea for a tech startup, VintageLIVE, which is my most recent venture. My tech lead and I have been working on the project for the last few months and just started fundraising. Strangely, the craziness of the Coronavirus makes the innovation we are working on exponentially timely. We’re creating a new online retail shopping experience that we’ll start out applying to the resale sector which feels like the ultimate win-win-win. It will promote sustainable shopping, make online vintage/thrift shopping fun, effortless, and engaging, and will also help small and medium sized businesses capitalize on their branding, personality, and unique stories to sell online. The current store closures highlight the fact that small and medium sized businesses need a new way to adapt to further online migration. We’re giving stores a platform that helps them capitalize on their strong suits and individuality to engage customers and woo them back from big online retailers.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Overall, the store has been a surprisingly smooth endeavor which I’m so, so grateful for. The ease of the business has helped me gain confidence as a business owner and entrepreneur. Having no prior retail experience, it took a huge leap of faith to open a retail business. I was so nervous about opening that I did not invite a single person to the store’s opening weekend. I just finished setting up the store, opened the front door, set out my sign, and waited to see if it was going to work. It felt like a total experiment. People from the neighborhood and others started walking in and to my amazement they bought things. The first weekend 200 people came in and by my sixth week I was profitable. It worked from the very beginning. I think it actually helped that I didn’t have previous retail experience because it allowed me to create my own unique version of it. I didn’t follow prescribed formulas which allowed me to trust my intuition and let things evolve organically.
My biggest struggles to date have come with VintageLIVE and have had to do with my own personal growth. At first I suffered from a false belief that tech entrepreneurs had special knowledge that granted them access to an unattainable, exclusive world – that they knew something I didn’t. The first thing I had to do was strip away that belief. And letting go of self limiting beliefs is so much easier said than done because they tend to have multiple layers and run deep. A turning point for me came earlier this year during a conversation at CES, a tech conference that takes place every January. While talking to people about my project I was astonished to discover that I knew more about a specific sphere of online retail innovation than others who were working and developing technology within the industry. I started to understand that, not only was I capable of doing this business but, I actually was already doing it. I’ve had to do some deep work on my confidence to get to this place where I actually believe I can do it and I still have so far to go. Honestly, I think confidence is more than half the battle. I’ve had to evolve into a bigger version of myself to believe I can accomplish my vision. I’m finding that the further I get into it, the more fully I have to believe in the idea and in myself.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the 1619 Vintage story. Tell us more about the business.
With the store, the thing I’m most proud of is that it’s different from any other that I’ve been in. I’ve brought a new take on vintage shopping to life. I’ve had experience realizing my vision with my artwork and interior design projects but the store takes it to an experiential level. Everything in the store has passed through my hands — the homemade shelves and clothing racks, the paintings that hang on the walls, the collection of goods. Because of this there is a cohesiveness that’s palpable when you walk through the door. It feels completely different than any other retail space and is its own authentic and unique thing. There’s a casualness to the store that is welcoming and approachable and yet everything is beautifully displayed. It has a distinct point of view that broadens the scope of what a store can be.
The common thread that connects the store to my new business is that they both offer consumers a new and unique approach to things. My tech business is the scaled up version of my store’s concept. I believe VintageLIVE can be incredibly impactful and has the potential to revolutionize the way we shop online. I’m so excited by the idea of driving change within the industry and consumer behavior, on a massive level, toward replacing new purchases with used goods. The resale industry is projected to double in the next five years, and the Coronavirus’s effect on the economy will only accelerate and increase consumers’ migration to resale for its value and alignment with conscious consumerism. Along with rapid industry expansion comes a ton of opportunity to author what that growth will look like. We’re in a very exciting time. On a cultural level people are shopping less and are making more conscientious decisions. We’re doing a bit of course correcting when it comes to consumerism and space is opening up to educate, promote sustainability, and steer people towards sustainable goods. My new company will reach an exponential amount of people with information, an inspiring shopping experience, and sustainable options.
Has luck played a meaningful role in your life and business?
I think I have been very lucky and yet I’m not sure I believe in the traditional idea of luck. When things have worked out easily they’ve been the right step for my life’s path and work. I’m so grateful for those moments because I think they’ve been clear indicators of being on the right track. On the other side of the equation, things that seemed unlucky at the time have actually forced me to go in different, more aligned directions and have been important moments that pivoted me to the next thing. In order to do that I’ve had to let go of old ideas, wait for inspiration, believe myself and my intuition, and I’ve known the next thing to do. With the store closed during the quarantine and the economy in a very questionable state, it feels like this roadblock is directing me to turn my attention to VintageLIVE so I can make a larger impact.
Pricing:
- Dresses: $45 – $125
- Shirts: $25 – $85
- Accessories: $20 – $75
- Artwork: $50 – $5,000
Contact Info:
- Address: 1619 Silver Lake Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90026 - Website: 1619silverlake.com & vintage.live (coming soon!)
- Phone: 3234721777
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: @1619_silverlake & @shop_vintage_live
Image Credit:
Dani Muller
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