Charlie Oxley and Freddie Rose were part of what they dub “the charity shop brigade” when they met as students at Newcastle in 2015.
“We were on a student budget but wanting to have our own identity and wear unique clothes, and the charity shops in the city were silly cheap,” Rose grins.
“We’d meet up with friends and go to ‘fill a bag’ or ‘kilo sales’ to find new things to wear, and people started to wonder, because we were on a budget, how we kept mixing up our wardrobes.”
They bonded over their love of preloved fashion, and today that passion has spawned a £1.5 million turnover vintage business with a Covent Garden store and presences in Selfridges, Adidas and other big brands.
Initially, though, the friends — both now 30 — graduated into other roles: Rose worked in sports marketing, Oxley at a boiler start-up.
“We kept on thrifting and started to realise that we had the perfect skillsets to build a business,” Rose says.
Vintage Threads was launched as a side hustle, selling pre-loved fashion initially online “via a WordPress site that a friend set up in a few hours in 2016. We wanted to bring vintage to new audiences and promote the sustainable benefits.”
The pair were both living in London by 2018, growing Vintage Threads after they had finished their day jobs. The closest laundry to Oxley’s (bedroom) headquarters in Hackney was a 20-minute walk away.
Instead of him walking, “I spent my evenings cycling to the laundrette while rolling a huge suitcase behind me, so I could get there and back as quickly as possible to start packing orders and shooting stock for the website. I was always welcomed with people hooting the horn!”
Rose says they would then upload the photos, shoot social media content and manage order fulfilment “until the wee hours”.
In the early days, stock came from “kilo sales” — buying sacks of clothes, paid for according to weight — and charity shops: “They had a lot more gems up for grabs [back then],” Rose notes.
But as demand increased, they flew off for overseas sourcing trips, which involved “driving around the Amalfi coast in old bangers and playing five-a-side tournaments at midnight with our suppliers in Thailand.”
From the start, the duo focused on building their own brand rather than using resell sites such as Depop and eBay. Marketing involved “bringing sacks of stickers, flyers, and branded lighters with discount codes to music festivals”.
Growth has been fuelled by social media: “The Instagram boom perfectly coincided with how we wanted to connect with our audience directly and provided the perfect customer journey funnel to our website.”
After opening a Hackney Wick studio in January 2020, the entrepreneurs “had a year we will never forget,” Oxley says.
Due to lockdown rules, it was pretty much Fred and I spending months together in the studio — FaceTiming suppliers, steaming and shooting clothes, packing orders and our Instagram began to surge.”
All stock was — and remains — hand-picked: now the pair have 23 “pickers” worldwide, to whom they send a buying list.
They scour local wholesalers and charity shops, send the founders photos back, and are then offered a guide price before the items are shipped to London.
Rose and Oxley also visit Italy, their biggest supply market, every fortnight.
Lockdown was a catalyst for growth: turnover quadrupled from around £20,000 a month to £90,000 a month as shopping went digital.
Supply, though, was constrained as many large UK warehouses were shuttered: “We had to find new vintage suppliers from countries that didn’t have as strict lockdowns, such as Malaysia and Indonesia.”
After lockdown, turnover slipped as “everyone wanted to go back out onto the high street and look at clothes rather than staring at a screen, so we had to pivot.” The duo returned to their roots, with stalls at Truman Brewery in Shoreditch and in markets.
They opened their first shop, in Neal Street, Covent Garden, in January 2022, and pop-ups elsewhere led to the chance to set up Vintage Threads in Selfridges that October.
“They were looking for a pre-loved partner to boost sustainability. It was a huge moment for us to see a brand that started in our bedrooms get a permanent space in the world’s leading department store,” Rose says.
The business was self-funded from the start, with profits from a first £350 purchase of stock from a vintage wholesale warehouse being reinvested.
Vintage Threads is now a team of 16, all aged 30 or under, and its founders want to expand across Europe and the US. “We want Vintage Threads to be the first vintage company to have a store in every major city,” says Oxley. “Something that hasn’t been achieved by anyone yet — scaling vintage is challenging due to its one-off nature.
“The best moment is being able to get up every day and do what I love. It doesn’t feel like work to me.”
