Addicted to :: Huzzah! Vintage

This week, my dear readers, I’m giving you the inside scoop on an up-and-coming vintage seller on Etsy. Pay close attention because there’s a good chance you’ll be seeing this shop on a Front Page near you. I introduce you to ggiotta, aka Huzzah! Vintage.

Q: Tell our lovely readers a bit about yourself. Is buying and selling vintage your full-time gig or a hobby? How and when did you get started in this business?

A: Let’s see…My name is Gina, I live in the gloriously diverse city of Oakland, CA, and the last movie I endured was The House Bunny. Buying and selling vintage is not a full-time job for me, but it does help reconcile my clashing love for research (of the archival variety) and money. I am ostensibly an academic, thinking, writing and professing about the prickly subject of mediated communication. Selling vintage is something I’ve been doing with varying degrees of commitment over the past six years in order to supplement a paltry teaching salary and thin out my own collection.

Q: Do you have any favorite, never-let-you-down, treasure hunting spots? Would you like to share, or are they top-secret?

A: There is this one little overstuffed charity shop in my neighborhood that I pop into with great frequency. It’s connected to a Catholic church that boasts what would appear to be a very well-to-do parish, so (and this sounds terribly morbid) when these folks die, the charity shop gets a lot of fantastic pieces from their estates. And unlike so many similar charity boutiques, this one doesn’t pick over its donations in order to find quality items to auction on Ebay. If it looks nice, it goes in the showroom. So pleasantly quaint, right?!

Q: Is there a certain aesthetic you look for when you’re thrifting? How do you decide what to pick up, or just pass on? Do you wait for an item to speak to you?

A: I can’t ever recall an item ‘speaking’ to me. (Perhaps I should increase my bourbon consumption?) I do love color and texture and prints. These are the things that draw me to a piece, followed very closely by condition. I’m not very handy with a needle and thread, so I only source pieces that are immediately wearable (or, in the case of housewares and supplies, useable/displayable).

Q: Be honest, do you keep many of your finds, or is it strictly business? And do you have any personal collections that you have built over time through thrifting?

A: I do, on occasion, keep items I’ve thrifted, but I try to keep this type of hoarding to a minimum. I’m not very sentimental, and I very much dislike clutter, so it’s not a tall order to keep. Thanks to many years in college radio and a nearby Amoeba Music, I’ve built up a respectable vinyl collection that abruptly ends in 2004 (when file sharing became easy for Mac users). More recently, my partner and I have begun to replace our homemade and practically-homemade Ikea furniture with real wood (ie, quality) mid-century pieces. I also find myself keeping more and more dresses, which is particularly strange since I so rarely wear them.

Q: Are there any items you’ve regretted selling and wish you would have kept for yourself?

A: I wish that I hadn’t sold the striped polyester shirt that I wore when I got my driver’s license photo snapped at age 16. That shirt was fantastic.

Q: Pick one and tell us about it: Weirdest, most valuable, or most satisfying find?

A: A few months ago I found a little leather purse in the aforementioned charity shop that looked so unusual I had to scoop it up. I held off listing it for many weeks because I couldn’t figure out whether it was from the 1970s or the interwar years. After much research, I decided on the latter, listed it as such, and shipped it off to a collector a few weeks later who wrote to tell me that it was among the most exquisite pieces she’d ever seen from the era. That truly made my week, especially since the purse almost didn’t make the final cut that day at the charity shop!

Thanks to Gina for telling us a bit about her vintage addiction. And folks, just remember where you heard about Huzzah! first!

Robin Eastwood is a treasure hunter and vintage fanatic. Visit The Fancy Lamb on Etsy to drool over some of her latest finds, and follow Robin on Twitter to hear about her latest thrifting adventures.