Is the vintage industry cooked?

Is the vintage industry cooked?

Three years ago, I turned a hobby into a business. An avid thrifter, I was knowledgable, but not an expert. I started off by opening a curated thrift studio, because I believed, even back in 2023, that vintage pricing in NYC had gotten out of hand (lol).

Then, I took a chance on vintage luxury. I posted 8 vintage designer bags under $600 (most were my own collection) on TikTok one random night in January 2025 and woke up with 500K views and over 1K DMs begging me for the bags. I knew I found something.

I genuinely got into thrifting for the love of the game, but the vintage designer side of the industry cracked me open. I loved the sourcing. I loved learning from sellers who became friends. The pieces, the stories, the fabrics, the beadings, the designers - they genuinely blew me away. Coming from a career in tech, this was a world I never knew, full of fashion, dress-up, and fun.

I didn’t know everything, but I took it upon myself to study, read, analyze shows, learn designer names and their pronunciation, take classes at FIT, and genuinely embrace the craft. I loved scrounging around in Vogue’s old runway archives. I loved using current fashion shows to predict vintage trends. I loved vintage (and still do obviously).

Since then, in what seems to be a span of less than 18 months, vintage exploded. What started as an unlikely passion project turned into an extremely viable seven figure business.

Meanwhile, the ground was shifting underneath all of us.

AI bot activity on the internet surpassed human activity on the internet in June 2026. (Cloudflare).

Two-thirds of that AI activity was training crawlers (i.e bots that copy websites all day so AI companies can teach their models). Retail and e-commerce was their single biggest target - 62.5% of crawler traffic. ~30% was real humans asking a language model like ChatGPT to shop for them. And 1.7% was something new - AI agents that didn’t just look a page but actually physically shopped on it. That sliver grew 7,851% in a single year!!! (HUMAN Security, 2026 State of AI Traffic Report).

So what does this mean? AI companies are training their models specifically on retail and ecommerce. Why is that the focus? Agentic shopping is the next frontier.

For better or worse, a vintage seller’s job is uncovering pieces in the depths of the internet and the odd edges of the world. Paired with vintage virality online, the rise in tariffs, and the increase in education around sustainability and secondhand shopping, these agentic shoppers are adding another layer of complexity to vintage sellers’ lives.

As someone who came from tech, this made me pause. What’s next for vintage? Where do I fit in?

After 3 solitary weeks in Northern Michigan thinking about this, here are my takeaways:

What’s next for vintage?

The vintage/secondhand shopping industry is, in fact, NOT COOKED. It’s just getting started. People are only beginning to understand the value of vintage, and that won’t change anytime soon.

What I believe will end is selling for the sake of selling. AI can retrieve things for you (think: I’m looking for a black nylon vintage Prada bag). What AI can’t do is curate, predict, upcycle, and give you the human experience behind how you sourced something.

As with any industry, the cream will rise and the true curators will remain. The people who are in it for the love of the game, the curators who have trained their eye for decades, who know why a piece matters and can tell you the story behind it. Retrieval is solved with agentic shopping, but taste can’t be.

Where do I fit in?

Somewhere along the way, in the short 3 years I’ve been in this space, vintage became formulaic. A viral video, a $1 start. I’m not judging. I’m a part of this. I may even be a leader in this.

Perhaps because of this change, I stopped being a person who loved the hunt and became a person obsessed with throughput. What started as a passion project turned into a race for profits.

I will NEVER be the one to tell a woman not to optimize for profits. For far too long women are told to be less, to make less, and to shrink down. Let me be clear… I will never apologize for running a for-profit business in a man’s world, and frankly I don’t think I need to. But I did start to wonder: would I enjoy the process more if I got back to my roots?

All this reflection led me to ask myself one more question…

How could I do things differently from here on out?

What if we ran our vintage store like a fashion house? What if we treated drops like collections - a feeling, a vibe, a mood if you will ;) What if we did editorial shoots instead of just social media content? What if we moved slower instead of faster? What would happen then?

The love of the sourcing is where I started and where I’d like to stay. If I’m the owner of the company, I can choose what I’m optimizing for. Enjoyment, creativity, and curation could be a cool goal.

I want to make the case that you can do this thoughtfully and still have it be a real business. Not just a hobby with good taste. A real, profitable business.

If you’re interested in seeing how I navigate these next moments, follow along. <3