We were lucky to catch up with Rebekka Adams recently and have shared our conversation below.

Rebekka , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What can you share with us about the story behind how you found your key vendors?

Running a vintage boutique is uniquely different from any other sort of retail establishment. We carry one-of-a kind women’s clothing, jewelry, and accessories from the 1900s-1980s.

For starters, we cannot hop on a website or head to a trade show and place an order for inventory mass manufactured in another country. Every single item in our shop is pre-loved and chosen with care regarding age, quality, and style. This means that we must be creative in sourcing our inventory and that completely relies on building relationships with other people.

Many resellers will thrift at donation stores and go to garage and estate sales, trading time for the thrill of the hunt, hoping they find “gold.” We took an alternative approach. We spent a lot of effort networking, building out our website with best SEO practices (search engine optimization) and market that we purchase vintage clothes and jewelry. Most of our inventory comes from private collectors and estates that others won’t find on their own. This also gives us the highest quality items as they often came out of someone’s closet and were well kept before they come to us.

The joy of this is that since every item is preloved, we often get to meet the person or family member of whom loved the item. We often get the backstory of “grandma wore this dress here, oh and here’s a photo of her in it.” The nostalgia and backstories are priceless.

We also build relationships with other vintage dealers across the nation. We often find items that won’t sell in Austin (think heavy winter coats and sweaters) that our friends up north love and need. We have established wholesale and trade relationships with them. The fun part of acquiring inventory for a vintage shop is that you never quite know what you will find. I believe that a key to this industry is to always remember that we don’t exist in a silo and that we are all interdependent in keeping this circular and sustainable economy alive.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Bloomers and Frocks is a niche vintage clothing boutique specializing in women’s vintage clothing, jewelry, and accessories from the 1900s-1980s, with a heavy concentration on the 1960s and older. We are different from other vintage shops in that we carry older, rarer, more unique pieces, we clean our items before they come into our shop (a rarity in this business) and we label all our clothing with decades and measurements to make it easier to shop. We also pride ourselves in giving the best customer service as possible. If you come into the shop seeking a dress to wear to a special event, we will find out the details, measure you, and pull garments that will fit your needs. While this service was commonplace in decades gone by, it too may be “vintage” as it is rare to receive this service except in luxury boutiques. We want you to feel like you are shopping with your best friend when you come into our boutique!

The owner, Rebekka Adams, got into the business as a child, selling vintage costume jewelry at flea markets in the summertime in Michigan with her grandmother. She worked retail throughout college and graduate school. After pursuing a 10-year career in economic and small business development, she decided to launch her own retail boutique. Bloomers and Frocks was born due her interactions and inspiration with other vintage shops in Austin.

In addition to the Austin boutique, found at 1628 S 1st Street, Bloomers and Frocks can be found in New Orleans inside the Trashy Diva Vintage Market (1920 Magazine Street), and on their e-commerce website bloomersandfrocks.com.

Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?

For the first year of the shop, I, the owner Rebekka, worked the shop solo. It wasn’t until a year of business that I hired my first employee. About 9 months after I opened the bricks and mortar shop, a large-scale condo development broke ground next door to us. We are a small stone house built in the late 1930s, and the development next door was to be a 4-story mixed use condo development with buried parking. As we are in Central Texas, our ground is hard and digging to bury parking is no easy feat. It took the construction company 6 months just to dig the pit. About 3 months in, I had had enough. It was 8 hours a day of non-stop jack-hammering. The headaches and the constant vibrations had done a number on me. I peeked over the construction fence and snapped a photo of the machine causing so much anxiety to send to my husband to complain. And instead of that, I threw a banner on the photo and made what I called a “jackhammer sale.” It is by far the worst graphic I ever created. I originally meant it as a joke but ran with it. I figured if I could drive more traffic to the shop, I wouldn’t hear the construction noise as much. I ran a sale with the entire store, buy 2 items, get 1 free. And by golly, it was the best sale we have ever had! Everyone came in to check it out. They wanted to know what a “jackhammer sale” was. I literally made it up to calm my own nerves and it worked! I still laugh, 6 years later, that something so “imperfect” in marketing, worked so perfectly. The moral to the story is that you don’t need to have the best graphics or marketing to be successful. You must be different, authentic, and have an engaged audience.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

I have had ups and downs in employment over the years. Retail is not usually a long-term employment prospect, and it is an industry with high turn-over. I am grateful that I have employees with me for a few years at a time. It has taken some time to figure out what works best for keeping employees and for making their experience meaningful. Covid set me back in terms of staffing as I had to lay off all employees (including myself) just to make ends meet while we were shut down. It was also an opportunity to restart and find a balance.

As retail isn’t a super high paying job, I try to give back knowledge to all employees on how to run a business based on their interests. At every interview, I ask what they hope to learn (aka buying, marketing, product knowledge, bookkeeping, etc) and provide that knowledge along the way while they are working for me. I open my books to all employees so that they can see where we are at and how they play a role in sales and running the business. And once they are trained, I give them the authority to make decisions in the best interest of the shop. This simple act of trust goes a long way.

Additionally, I empower them to be part of the team and reward them whenever we surpass sales goals via profit sharing. I also pick up little treats along the way, such as chai lattes and sweets from our local bakery or tacos for lunch. I also make sure I thank everyone when they work. I don’t take their service for granted as they have choices to work anywhere. I truly value the time they spend helping grow our boutique.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://bloomersandfrocks.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bloomersandfrocks
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BloomersAndFrocks/
• Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/bloomersnfrocks
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/bloomers-and-frocks-austin