In last week’s Thrift-Shop Thursday post, I gave some suggestions for an online version of the thrift-shopping experience (not the same thing, I know, but I tried). Today I’d like to focus on consignment and vintage shops that sell clothing online, and more specifically on those shops that only sell online—at a discount.

First, for the sake of clarity, some definitions:

Consignment is a deal between the owner of an item and a store (brick-and-mortar or online), where the store agrees to sell the item on behalf of the owner, in return for a percentage of the sale. Since the store naturally wants to make a profit, consigned items usually will have higher prices than the average thrift shop. On the other hand, consigned clothing tends to be of much higher quality; often high-end designer pieces find their way into consignment stores, because the owners want to recoup at least a little of their original investment, rather than just give them away.

Vintage is slightly more difficult to define precisely, although the correct usage is a reference to the year something was made (e.g. a VW Bug vintage 1968). Unlike the term antique, which describes items of a minimum age (usually 100 years), vintage generally seems to refer now to almost anything that’s not actually brand-new. However, in this post, let’s assume we’re talking about clothing that’s clearly not from the current fashion era, say, 10 years old or more.

In the interest of keeping this post relatively short, I’m just going to give you one example shop in each category. (If you’d like to look around for more, I used the search terms “online consignment shop”, and “online vintage shop”.) Continue reading →