Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Inell Kirkpatrick Dana Warren. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Inell Kirkpatrick , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?

We thought we needed something catchy, easy to remember, easy to find/spell on social media but wanted it to mean something to us.

What popped into our heads first was the influence of our grandmother’s in our love of all things vintage. Our grandmother’s told us stories of heirlooms in their homes, family lore and how far that piece may have traveled in it’s lifetime. That influences us greatly. We love the item we find when picking, but if it has a story we can share, all the better.

Dana’s grandma was called Nanny, my grandmother was Lilla. It didn’t roll off the tongue. But, I have an amalgamated name made up by my grandfather, of my grandmother’s oldest niece (Inez) and youngest sister Nell.
Nanny and Nell nested perfectly with our history, and our business name was born.

With our name nodding to our past, our tag line, A bit of Posh and Shambles, represents our present. Dana is the lover of all things British, her home is always tidy, her collections beautifully displayed. When setting for a vintage market, Dana spends hours making everything just so. She wants the customers to fall in love with a piece how it is displayed. She is the creative half of our duo, the Posh.

Me ( Inell) I am the numbers and heavy lifting. My house is always cluttered and I have no problem digging in grimey barns and outbuildings, my super power is how much I can fit from an estate sale in my Subaru Crosstrek! I am the shambles. Together, we feed off each others strengths and weaknesses, we don’t compete, we balance one another.
We are truly, a of posh and shambles.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

What Dana and I discovered through working at a dental office together for many years and being part of of a social selling jewelry company previously. We worked well together, and we loved working events and markets. We love that in person connection, to hear the stories of why a piece of McCoy pottery connected with someone. We met amazing fellow vendors that happily shared with us some tricks of the trade, what markets they liked and why. Vintage resellers are good people. They are very supportive of each other at markets and when we are out picking etc… There is a lot of pay it forward folks in this industry.

We started out 2017-2019 doing 7-8 vintage market a year. when we were not setting up and selling at a market, we were out picking, collecting, cleaning, researching, pricing and packing. It takes a lot of time on the back end before you make any profit on the front end. Our homes were bursting at the seems. We were both empty nesters at the time so we had all these spare rooms between our two houses. It finally got to the point we had to invest in renting a storage locker for our sanity. But we waited until Nanny and Nell had money in the bank so that it didn’t effect our home budgets.

Then 2020 hit, and all the markets closed up in our state due to COVID. We needed to pivot our business from in person to online because we had a storage locker full of vintage product. Neither of us are what you call tech savvy, but we did love Instagram, and followed many vintage decor influencers. So we did some research, DM’s some other resellers, found a Facebook Group dedicated to reselling vintage on Instagram with designated sale dates and hashtags were used that had 1000’s of followers. We found an amazing Instagram selling coach Sarah, @the.vintage.shop.coach who really helped us learn to navigate growing our Instagram account, sales and best practices in working with IG customers. With Sarahs help and the Facebook group of IG sellers, we learned from seasoned IG sellers, to broaden our customer base outside our local area and to fine tune what type of vintage items were are true market. 2020 was a huge year of growth for our small vintage business. We felt very luckY when so many businesses faltered because of COVID related issues. 2021 saw in person markets come back at half capacity and now in 2022 they are back to full swing. We have paired down on in person vintage markets and have decided to just do 4-5 a year and continuing to sell on instagram once or twice a month when we do not have a market.

We started out selling anything and everything large pieces, furniture, primitives, rusty crusty bits and bobs. But what our Instagram and in person customers really loved from us was our small and our vintage holiday items. During the holiday season OCt-Dec we repurpose vintage holiday items and create scenes and dioramas. People LOVE them!

75% of what we sell is under $30. We have found 1/3 of our customers are buying a piece because they are decorating their home off of something they saw on HGTV or another IG influencers page, 1/3 are collectors, adding a piece long sought after for their personal collections and 1/3 are replacing a treasured piece that was their grandmothers and it was lost, broken or a rotten cousin got it instead of them. Those are our favorites, when a piece brings a tear to the eye and a story to the lips. It really makes us feel there is more to this than just profits.

Yes, we need to make a profit just like the next business, but we pride ourselves on being fair. So many Instagram resellers have gotten so greedy and have jacked the prices up ridiculously high. Chunky white butter pats 4 years ago were $5 each now in the last year, we see them selling for $28-45 each. People get FOMOOV ( fear of missing out on vintage ) and buy them in a frenzy, but then what happens, is like everything, the trend looses traction, the influencers move on to something else and that butter pat is only worth $5 again. So again, we make a conscious effort to be fair, look at what we paid for the item and price it not just what it is listed on one of the online selling platforms, , but a fair price that will keep our customers returning to us because they can afford us.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

We have chosen to grow our social media presence a bit more organically than the norm. We have done our research and know there are ways to get huge followings more quickly, but we like having a connection to our followers. When you get big, you start getting more trolls, hackers and haters. there is enough hate in the the world, without asking for more. We love Instagram because it is the most positive and inviting.. We decided to concentrate our efforts on one social media platform, and hopefully do it well instead of all the platforms and do it badly.

When someone follows us, we know 80% of the time, we had a personal interaction with them recently at a market, or they followed us because a friend recommended us. Bigger is not always better. Hopefully one day we will hit 5000 followers, but for now, a few new followers a week fits our style. We try to keep a balance with work and family. Our families don’t need to see our faces buried in our phones all day long keeping upon postings, worrying about comments and likes. Not healthy for anyone. We used to do more vignette still photo sales, but we found that our customers at our market lives, live sales and live loot shoot give us the highest number of customers and positive comments. Everyone tells us they love them the most, because, they feel connect to us, that they are part of the market, even though they live across the country. We are kind of screwballs, we don’t dress for the camera, rarely have make up on. Many times on a live loot shoot we are dirty, sweaty and tired. We are real to our audience and not staged. We are laid back and fun. We have heard so many times, “I am at this market because I saw your live “or” my husband came into the room because he wanted to know why I was laughing so hard. “That would be us and the retelling of the Nanny and Nell adventures and antic of the day.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Stay in your lane……… Don’t try and buy vintage product that doesn’t speak to your niche. In the beginning we bought everything and it was a mess. It’s easy to get caught up into what you see others buying and selling quickly. We learned early on that big pieces of furniture and primitives were not our thing. We love it, we are envious of other resellers that find it and resell it, but it is not for us. Mostly because we do not have the storage space at our houses, and it is dang heavy! Our husbands work full time and help us when they can, but most of the time its just Dana and I lugging it to and from. We decided to stick with things we can more easily handle. Also we would set our booth up beautifully, then a piece of furniture would sell and all our small would be on the floor until one of us could run to the trailer to get another table. That is so stressful in the middle of a busy market! We let the other vintage resellers handle the large pieces and we will happily root them on and admire them from afar.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: Nannyandnell