We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Nicole & Billy Dinkins a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Nicole & Billy, thanks for joining us today. Often outsiders look at a successful business and think it became a success overnight. Even media and especially movies love to gloss over nitty, gritty details that went into that middle phase of your business – after you started but before you got to where you are today. In our experience, overnight success is usually the result of years of hard work laying the foundation for success, but unfortunately, it’s exactly this part of the story that most of the media ignores. Can you talk to us about your scaling up story – what are some of the nitty, gritty details folks should know about?

As a Vintage Furniture business that literally started in our living room, learning to invest in ourselves in order to scale up was the biggest challenge.

Originally Envy Vintage began by thrifting most of our furniture finds, storing and staging in our home, and moving/delivering with our Toyota Tacoma. This went on for a couple years before becoming unsustainable—we would “sell out” via our online audience in minutes! We realized (albeit slowly) that we needed to scale to grow.

Our first big investment was a trailer in 2019. We took out a small loan for a 16’ trailer and the rest is history! It was a game-changer as far as our ability to provide consistent inventory for our loyal customers. But then with increased inventory storage became a problem—our living room, dining room, and garage (let’s be honest) quickly became too small to store our Vintage finds.

Our next big, scary step in scaling was renting a warehouse space for storage. We knew we didn’t want to operate out of a storage unit (although we did temporarily for about a month), because it wasn’t easy to access or view the all the pieces. We identified a warehouse space about a mile from our house, and signed a year lease. It was so scary! The warehouse rent was more than our mortgage. But we knew we needed to have space if we wanted to grow.

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

Envy Vintage was born out of our mutual love for the quality of vintage pieces. We knew that the Mid Century Modern style was trending with stylish name-brand furniture, but with quality *vintage* pieces we could offer similar pieces at a fraction of the price—all while saving them from a landfill. The ultimate form of recycling!

We often say that the condition after 50-60 years is a testament to the quality of construction. It sounds cliché, but they truly don’t “build them like they used to.” For the most part, current mass-produced furniture simply doesn’t stand up to the test of time.

We also pride ourselves on offering “something for everyone.” Our pricing is based on maker, quality, and condition, and we do aim to offer various price points for our customers.

How did you build your audience on social media?

When we started out, we couldn’t keep up with demand. Our customers kept asking when we would have more! So we quickly realized that the best way to keep our customers up-to-date was Social Media. We decided on the name Envy Vintage (NV is Nicole’s maiden-name initials), and created business Pages on Instagram and Facebook as a “landing pad” for our customers. Instagram is still our primary mode of sales and communication with customers, and days when we unload the trailer with new inventory are always busy! Some customers even have notifications turned on to see what we get in stock!

Social Media has also been integral to our growth, primarily just by “sharing” and tagging Envy Vintage. It’s such a big help! We really don’t advertise much aside from sponsoring posts occasionally, but word-of-mouth is the ultimate form of flattery! We LOVE when customers share photos of our pieces in their homes and tag us on Socials. It’s a huge help to us getting our name out there, and we are also genuinely happy to provide a product that people love! It also gives us great content with beautiful examples of how to integrate Vintage pieces into modern design. Our customers have an amazing eye for design.

Do you have multiple revenue streams – if so, can you talk to us about those streams and how your developed them?

Part of our growth was identifying and connecting with furniture Dealers out-of-state so we could offer consistent inventory for our customers. As such, expenses such as hotels and storage units quickly began adding up to the tune of approximately $800/month. Ouch.

We decided to purchase a second home near our Dealers to use ourselves (thus replacing hotels/storage), but also to rent on AirBNB when vacant to offset those expenses. We figured if we broke even we’d be saving money by having an investment of our own!

It was a creative solution that has worked really well for us. The upfront expenses of downpayment, renovations, and furnishing were expensive, but it has been successful not only offsetting costs, but the AirBNB was profitable it’s first month!

Contact Info:

• Instagram: www.Instagram.com/Envy.Vintage
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/EnvyVintageFurnishings
• Other: NA

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