Over the years, I’ve learned that being a vintage store owner and having to develop along with technology is bizarre, but vintage and technology go together surprisingly well. We've really had to adapt what we’re doing in order to thrive as this big, pop culture store. I’ll dig more into that in a moment, but to rewind a bit...
My husband, Brandon, and I opened The Lucky Rabbit thirteen years ago after running a small computer repair and data recovery business that I didn’t enjoy. I wanted to do something interesting, impactful, and fun, and a confluence of many factors, including a growing interest in the reduce, reuse, recycle ethos and the recession, snowballed into opening this 7,000-square-foot antique mall.
We're a completely different business now—spread across multiple buildings with 130 vendors and a staff of 20 supporting what I describe as a nostalgia wonderland, or even superstore. And technology has so much to do with that. When we got started, social media was brand new to the masses, and what was impressive to them then—like these repurposed industrial light fixtures—was a lot less than it is now. We've had to buff up and adapt. Now it's all about the experience.
In addition to the vendors, we occupy about 30% of the space with our own creative displays. We’ve always had these crazy vignettes. I’d sit down with my husband and say, "I want to make a spring display out of planters, and I want the planters to be toilets and bras." He’d say, "You have lost your mind.” Then I’d jump on Google Images to find a reference, but you are not going to find this kind of thing easily.