Standing outside St. Cloud’s newest vintage store, you cannot be prepared for what you’re about to see.
Owner and curator Quint Warren has provided a small hint in the form of a sign on the door: “Please don’t touch the toys on display… and prepare to re-experience the ’90s.”
Inside, the store is packed with vintage clothes and decorated with ’90s memorabilia. Though they drum up significant interest, Warren said, his vintage toys are not for sale. The atmosphere is amplified by throwback tunes pulsing pleasantly in the background.
Warren opened Back to Vintage in February 2020. He’d been selling and trading vintage clothes for several years, and interest in his offerings grew over time, Warren said.Â
One-of-a-kind nostalgia fashion
Warren said he likes the rarity of this realm of fashion.
“I like to be able to put on a shirt knowing that I’m not going to see nobody else wearing it,” he said.
His “bread and butter” is the huge collection of band tees he has for sale in Back to Vintage. More than 600 band shirts run the gamut from vintage to current stuff, and the artists featured range from country to rap to hip-hop to Britney. (For the uninitiated, that would be Britney Spears.)
Warren said he tries to cater to a variety of tastes in his store.
“People come here and they love it,” Warren said. “It’s such a variety. And I hear that so much — that I got crazy variety.”
Most of his customers find him on social media or through word of mouth, Warren said. They come because “everything in the store is unique.”
Seventeen-year-old Emma Binsfeld, like several of Warren’s customers, found out about Back to Vintage through TikTok.
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Her taste for vintage fashion has developed over the last year, she said, and she hunts through thrift shops in town or in the Twin Cities for her vintage finds.Â
Binsfeld said she likes that Back to Vintage brings other options to St. Cloud shoppers.
“I think it’s cool to have a place like that so accessible rather than having to shop online or having to travel somewhere else,” she said.
What’s up with vintage pricing?
The popularity of vintage fashion resurged in 2020, but Warren said opening a vintage store in an area where there aren’t others like his means he’s also been doing a lot of educating.
“That’s what I took on,” he said.
The most common question customers have, he said, is how vintage sellers arrive at a price.
He explains that shirts from the 1990s are now 30-year-old shirts, he said. Their value increases with condition, quality, rarity and, of course, popularity.
An example: Some vintage shirts run small. That means it’s not unusual for more people to be looking for larger sizes, especially as most people are looking for a baggier fit from their vintage shirts. That means an XL shirt may cost $100 to $150 more than the same shirt in a smaller size, Warren said.Â
While everything on his main clothes racks sells for $100 or less, he has a display wall behind the cash register that features bigger-ticket items.Â
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Back to Vintage is open from noon to 7 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays at 3807 W. St. Germain St. Customers can buy, sell and trade vintage items in-store. Warren posts about new items on social media.
“I’m hooking people up with vintage fashion in an area where there’s no vintage fashion,” Warren said.
Sarah Kocher is the business reporter for the St. Cloud Times. Reach her at 320-255-8799 or skocher@stcloudtimes.com. Follow her on Twitter @SarahAKocher.
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