Only Good Things Start in Thailand

The vision to start selling vintage first came to me in December 2019 when I stepped into vintage a shop called ‘Soi 66’ in Chiang Mai, Thailand. I’d been traveling round the Thai islands, partying a lot and enjoying my first experience of solo traveling. I’d done little to no research or planning and was winging it. I made it to Phuket with a month before my flight to Vietnam. Someone recommended going up to the North. With time on my side and nothing to lose I decided to catch a flight the next morning. I spent the first couple days exploring Chiang Mai and hanging out with people from the hostel I was staying at. That morning I woke up with the urgency to do something more than sit round the pool smoking and drinking. So I rented a bike and set off to find a vintage shop. After riding round for an hour or so in the blistering heat, I decided to call it day as the stores I had found on google weren’t open. I was on my way back to drop the bike off to the rental shop when I rode past a store with jackets and T-shirts hung on metal fencing surrounding the entrance. I did a quick U-turn and that’s how I ended up outside Soi 66. It was run by this old skinny American guy, with a long white beard who had moved there back in the 70’s. He married a Thai woman, had a couple of kids and had been running the store for the past 15 years. It was an amazing collection of true vintage, stacks of t-shirts, amazing old work wear and a lot of denim. When I think back now to what was in that store, it kills me to think of the stuff I disregarded as my knowledge was no where near as extensive as it is now. I vividly remember going through a stack of 70s/80s band T-shirts which at the time didn’t interest me as all I was hunting for was 90’s skate brands and Polo Sport for myself. I stayed in that store all afternoon, picking up stack after stack of clothes, sat down on a tiny plastic kids chair and began going through all of them. At first I was just thinking of what I wanted. I’d found an 2000’s velour Stussy zip up and an off white Polo Sport shirt with a lovely navy cord collar. I took them to the old American guy behind the counter, he put them through the till and told me the price. I quickly did the conversion on my phone and that’s when the light bulb moment happened. I checked the tags on them again to make sure the reason they were so cheap wasn’t because they were bootleg and to my surprise they checked out good. I took them back to hostel and spent the rest of the evening thinking of how much these pieces would go for back home. I also had a load of messages on instagram asking to buy pieces I’d been posting on my story as anything cool I saw I posted on there. This was the second lightbulb moment but with the plan to travel for a few more months, it wasn’t possible to buy everything that people were asking for and still travel for as long as I wanted.
went back the next day and did the same as I did the day before. Pick up a stack of clothes, sit on the tiny plastic chair and go through every piece. But this time I was putting anything I thought would sell in a pile on the side. I found a couple Ben Davis shirts, Harley Davidson Ts and Bowling shirts with embroidered logos on the back. The pile was growing and at this point I thought I was going to be traveling for the next couple months. I couldn’t carry it all. And even if I could, I didn’t have enough money to buy the clothes and continue to travel. So I asked the people in the store to hold my pile till the next morning, so I could figure two things. Was it worth it and was it possible. After consulting my Mum who’d built her business from the ground up, going to flea markets at 5am to find antiques to sell on, to then opening a store that has now been open for over a decade. She told me to “think long and hard” about it and that “its a risk but if you think it will work, do it”. She also reminded me that I’d been saving for the past 9 months to be where I was. I had putting nearly my whole pay check away from my supervisor job at Size that I got because I knew I’d be on a good enough pay to be able to save to go traveling and that buying all these clothes would mean I’d come home earlier than expected. But my only thought at this moment was “I have to do this”.I decide I was only going to travel for one more month and spend the majority of my money on the clothes. So the next morning I went back the shop, haggled with the old American guy with the promise of “I’ll be back” (which unfortunately never happened, buts that’s a story for another time).
I ended up getting the pile for decent price, shook his hand and flagged down a Tuk Tuk to get the clothes back to my hostel. I stashed them in a locker and explained to the staff I’d be back in a month as I had flight to Vietnam in weeks time and there was no way I was carrying all that stuff round with me. They happily agreed after talking the manager Gordon. I locked the clothes up and jumped on a bus to continue the journey. First stop was Pai then back to Phuket to catch my flight to Hanoi. The rest of my trip all I could think about was trying to find more stuff. To this day, that drive, that constant urge to find new pieces hasn’t left me. As soon as I landed in Vietnam, even though I knew I couldn’t buy any more, my was first thought was to find the nearest vintage shop or market. I travelled round Vietnam for another 3 weeks before heading back to Chiang Mai to pick the clothes up so I could get the cargo home. When I arrived in Chiang Mai the news came out that there was an outbreak of a contagious virus that at the time I didn’t think was that serious. How I was wrong. When I finally arrived back in Cardiff with the precious cargo safely in my hands, that was when was when the hard work really started.