We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Alejandro Graterol & Heather Beck a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alejandro & Heather, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?
I wish we could share a video of the few days of us spent writing, rewriting and combining words to try out different names for our shop. We had sheets of paper with tons of names written down, crossed out, ranked, circled, etc. We kept narrowing it down, adding more, and then narrowing it down again. Then we’d take a few days to step away after not being able to come to a decision. We finally managed to narrow it down to two favorites, and we were leaning towards Afterglow, but were hesitant because there were a few other businesses with that name, or something similar. And when you’re deciding on your business name, you also want to think through potential snags like that. Will our name be confused with others? Will it get lost in the jumble? But we both felt the most drawn to Afterglow – we felt it evoked a feeling, a mood, and gave us a visual in our minds of the type of mood we desired to create with our space. We finally reached a point where we needed to come up with something relatively quickly, as so many other things we were ready to move forward on required us to have our name solidified. We finally called Alejandro’s mom for one last push of guidance, and she liked both names, haha. But we finally decided to go with our gut, the feeling, and decided on Afterglow. We trusted that the rest would work itself out, It was so exciting to decide and gain momentum on everything else after that decision! We knew it was the right name, and just needed to get past that bit of hesitation out of fear. After we passed that hump, it was so fun to create everything else with that momentum. And we still feel so aligned today with the name and everything it brings to mind, life, and our space.
Alejandro & Heather, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
Alejandro grew up outside of Seattle, then studied Sustainable Business and Interior Design at ASU. After moving to Denver in 2021, he worked a few jobs that aided in finding his way into the vintage world. He worked as a stylist, junk removalist, and eventually began doing estate clear-outs. Junk removal showed Alejandro how many items there were to be saved from landfills, and the estate clearout business allowed him to learn more about the history of vintage pieces – expanding his passion into styling with vintage pieces as well. He then realized his goal of providing an end-to-end furniture & goods solution for the average person. He wanted to both save items from landfill and make it easier for others to find high-quality, pre-loved pieces.
Heather grew up in southern Illinois before moving to Missouri to study mathematics. After graduating with a math degree, she moved to Chicago to explore job options and later began working in finance. She also decided to pursue obtaining her MBA at UIC during this time. After working in finance for a few years and deciding it wasn’t a great fit, as well as wanting to travel, she moved abroad to Thailand & Australia for 3 years. During her time abroad, her world view, as well as what she wanted out of life, took a huge shift. She came back to the US and felt reignited in her desire of owning her own business, and ended up creating art and selling vintage full time in St. Louis, which she was able to do for 2 years before hitting a financial dead end. With a strong intuition that she should move to Denver, she temporarily returned to the finance world for a couple of years to fund her move and regain some financial grounding before to returning to selling vintage full time in 2024. She feels that in this second entrepreneurial venture she has a broadened understanding of the ups, downs, and her personal desire to do whatever it takes to make her passions a daily reality.
Together, with Afterglow, we want to create an entire experience for people. We often get very vocal reactions of how great the space makes people feel right when they enter the door, and I think that speaks to our aligned vision and desire to create a “glow” – in both the space and people’s experience. We love finding pieces that evoke a feeling within us, a spark of something. And we believe that when you create a space full of pieces that mean something to you, you’re going to end up with a really wonderful feeling overall.
Overall, I’d say we’re really authentically us in what we do. We love having fun, we’re both a little scattered, we love creating beauty, and we like taking action and trying things. I genuinely feel that all of that is reflected in the shop, and that you can feel it when you walk in the door. We also want to help people create a space in their home or closet that they enjoy, and that evokes those same feelings for them in their own space. We love helping people figure out what calls to them and aiding them in building a space or a wardrobe based off of following those inklings. It’s honestly more than the physical things, it’s about getting in touch with what genuinely calls to you, and trusting that calling. It’s really great when people come back into the shop and show us pictures of pieces from our store in their home, and you can see and feel how happy they are with it and how much they love what it’s helped create for them, that’s such a cool thing for us to be able to experience with them.
Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?
We met in the summer of 2024, at a First Friday Art Walk actually! We briefly chatted about doing something together and exchanged information, but didn’t get in touch until a month or so later, after running into each other again and feeling like we were both further along on our paths that seemed to be getting closer to crossing. When we met up to chat ideas, we immediately hit it off and felt aligned on what we were looking to do in the vintage space. We even had a lot of the same ideas that we were waiting to put into action. which was very synchronistic. The timing felt perfect. We both felt we wanted a partner for the next stage of our business journeys, and after a few initial conversations were ready to take the jump into business together! It really moved so fast. We both are pretty abundance-minded and try not to act out of fear, so we didn’t really get bogged down with a lot of the logistics of things or what a partnership meant on the back end. We believe this is part of why our partnership flows so well and why we’ve experienced a decent amount of success; we love taking imperfect action versus trying to make everything perfect before taking steps forward. Sometimes when you trust and keep taking action, things and people will be placed in your path that help make your dreams a reality.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
Depending on personal experience, some people often view other businesses in the same industry purely as competition. But we genuinely care about other businesses in our industry, the people who run them, and have good experiences interacting with other vintage sellers and small business owners. You usually understand a lot of the challenges each other faces and can gain insight and momentum from working together, instead of being afraid of other’s success. It’s such a game changer to turn towards people, instead of viewing them as a competitor. We all know how difficult it can be at times running a small business, and having other people who understand to turn to in those times can make a huge impact on your experience and resilience overall. There are so many things we’ve learned through others, and have been able to create a lot of synergistic relationships through working together.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @afterglow.denver
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/afterglow-vintage-denver
- Other: Google Maps: https://maps.app.goo.gl/pp59xkaBL6G7wxGz9?g_st=com.google.maps.preview.copy