Store Owners Band Together for Vintage Fall Crawl
MSPMag: In the Twin Cities, vintage shop owners aren’t competing with each other. They’d rather support each other and lift each other up.
That’s how the first-annual Vintage Fall Crawl came to be, at least. Tandem Vintage owner Amanda Baumann and The Mustache Cat owner Rebecca Sansone were kicking around ideas one day, hoping to find a way to collaborate and connect their vintage shops and customers.
“My wife always gets those Pub Passes for local breweries,” Baumann says. “I don’t really drink beer, but she’ll bring me along. She gets stamps [for free drinks at each brewery], and maybe we’ll go to a thrift store in between.”
Baumann thought: What if we could do that for vintage shopping?
She and Sansone—along with the teams at Moth Oddities and Style Society—took that idea and ran, until it transformed into the first-annual Vintage Fall Crawl. The crawl highlights 12 women-owned vintage shops selling clothing, homewares, or both in Minneapolis and St. Paul, October 1 through November 21. Customers can purchase a shopping passport at any participating store (or buy one online), and receive 15 percent off a purchase at all 12 stops. If customers visit all 12 throughout the crawl, they’ll be entered to win gift cards from the shops. Passports are $10 each, and all proceeds from passport sales go to Women Advocates, a women’s shelter in St. Paul that helps people get out of domestic abuse situations.
“Obviously it’s not an exhaustive list of all the women-owned vintage shops in the Twin Cities,” Baumann says. “We wanted to start small this year and hopefully expand next year.”
Since the crawl goes for a month and a half, Baumann suggests picking a neighborhood and hitting all the shops around it on gorgeous fall weekend days (including shops not in the passport, she says), then repeating the process until you’ve visited every store on the list.
“We want to get people out to support brick-and-mortar again,” Baumann says.
