Vintage Dealers Need a New Holiday Marketing Playbook
Business of Vintage breaks it all down. Plus, Indyx is hosting their first-ever IRL closet sale this weekend, and a San Francisco vintage shop accuses Banana Republic of design theft. All this & more!
Welcome to Second Take: 🎤 what dealers and collectors are really talking about behind the scenes of the multi-billion dollar vintage and secondhand fashion industry.
PS: If you work in resale, your $5 paid subscription to Pre-Loved is likely a business expense.
Hey hi hello, everyone! Regular readers know we’re big fans of Gem here at Pre-Loved, ever since we interviewed founder, Liisa Jokinen back in (gasp!) 2020. For those not yet in the know, Gem aggregates inventory from over 700 vintage sellers and major resale platforms (eBay, Etsy, The RealReal, Depop, Vestiaire Collective, Poshmark)— they have 150 million listings and just added search-by-image.
I use it all the time.
This week, the New York Times covered Gem, with stories on how fashion writers, costume designers, and vintage collectors use the app to hunt down everything from Art Deco jewelry to those famous orange Maharishi pants Jennifer Aniston wore in so many 2000s paparazzi photos. If you’re not using Gem yet, you’re missing out!
In other friends-of-Pre-Loved news, Indyx is hosting their first-ever IRL closet sale this weekend in NYC (November 8-9, 11am-6pm). You can shop curated pieces from Indyx users with strong personal style — like former Pre-Loved Podcast guest, Heather Hurst! 🎧— and see how those items were originally styled in their closets.
“When shoppers get context and styling history instead of digging through mystery racks, sell-through goes up, without doing anything extra.”
—Devon Rule, co-founder of Indyx
You’ll walk out of the closet sale with your purchases already digitized in your Indyx account—skipping the hardest part of a digital wardrobe.
RSVP here for the event location— and if nothing else, just look at the cool pieces on offer! You’ll want to be there early.
💌 Pre-Loved brings you the new and noteworthy in vintage and secondhand fashion. In this letter, you’ll find:
Why luxury brands — with their earnings flat for six straight quarters — now see the secondhand market as their stiffest competition.
A San Francisco shop’s battle with Banana Republic over alleged design theft, and what it reveals about the vulnerability of small vintage businesses.
How brands mine their design archives for pre-loved collections —and why they’re turning to vintage curators to legitimize them.
Plus, I talked Devon Rule about the strategy behind the Indyx closet sale, why they’re hosting this event, and what’s cool about the tech they built to back it up
Below, a deep dive into holiday marketing with ‘Business of Vintage’ founder, Sloane Middleton Mann, the world’s only marketing agency specifically for vintage dealers.
Holiday Marketing for Vintage Dealers: A Q4 Survival Guide
with Sloane Middleton Mann, founder of Business of Vintage, on navigating Q4 sales, storytelling tactics, and where to invest your first $100-500 in advertising.
Can you tell us about your marketing background and what led you to focus on consulting vintage dealers?
I spent most of my career in vintage e-commerce at Chairish on their seller experience team as an online sales strategy coach. I was left with questions about how marketing and retail best practices translate to vintage, where every item is one-of-a-kind: traditional retail is rooted in having stock behind a SKU—that doesn’t work for vintage. So I enrolled at the Kellogg School of Management to study those best practices and see how I could translate them to the vintage space. Through that, I founded Business of Vintage, the world’s only marketing agency specifically for vintage sellers.
What are the most common misconceptions vintage dealers have about marketing?
Far too often, vintage sellers think about Instagram as their product catalog, but that’s not how you engage an audience or find growth. You have to story-tell, build a brand, and actually engage your audience. That doesn’t mean sharing every element of your life—figure out what niche subjects interest your audience and how to communicate them effectively. Enough with the static product photos on Instagram. Nobody is taking their time to look at those!
What marketing trends are you excited about for vintage sellers?
Storytelling. Everyone says ‘every vintage item has a story,’ but I hardly see anyone telling those stories. Think about your Instagram channel as a television network. People come to Instagram to be entertained or educated, not necessarily to shop, so keep their point-of-view in mind when you’re creating your content.
I’m particularly thinking about series formats using the “hero’s journey” storytelling device—bringing people behind the curtain of running a vintage shop. People love day-in-the-life content, but you can also layer it with compelling stories: how many sales you made in a day, what your customers purchased today, etc.
A big part of the hero’s journey is the trials and tribulations. People feel most engaged when there’s someone to root for. Building in public is a good thing—we don’t have to show the shiny final version. Show the trials: the shelf falling, not getting as many sales as expected. It feels vulnerable and hard to put out there, but people appreciate vulnerability online more than ever. You might get more reach than you expect.
How should dealers plan their Q4 revenue expectations this year?
It’s hard to quantify because 2025 has been a tough year for sales across the board. However, tariffs don’t affect most US-based vintage sellers, which is huge for the industry. We’re already seeing reports that interest in shopping vintage is growing in just in the past few months.
So now is the time to go pedal-to-the-metal with online marketing for holidays. Be on as many platforms as possible and create engagement so customers are encouraged to shop small with you, instead of with bigger brands.
When do you advise dealers start planning their holiday season marketing? When does the season really begin?
I think about holiday season marketing in three phases:
