The Birth of Oh Hello Vintage

Who would have thought that 2018 would see me starting my own vintage & lifestyle store? I certainly didn’t think this was on the cards, but when an opportunity presents itself, sometimes you just have to throw caution to the wind and go for it.

To a lot of people, it may have looked like Oh Hello Vintage was started on a whim, and whilst it was an insanely quick turnaround – 3 weeks – it’s been on my mind since I was a little girl.

In one way or another, I’ve always wanted my own shop. When I was little it was a clothing shop (that was after I wanted to be a truck driver, but that’s another story!), when I was a teenager it was my own clothing label with a coffee & cake shop and the older I got, the more it morphed into a place to sell everything I love. From Indie brands to vintage, homeware, fashion & accessories, I wanted the store to reflect me & be full of amazing pieces.

So when the opportunity to open a store came I didn’t think twice.

There are some things that you just have to try because you’ll never know if it’ll be amazing unless you actually try to do it. I’ve spoken a lot about imposter syndrome & failure and trust me when I say this decision absolutely terrified me when I stopped to really think about it. But I don’t want to not do something just because it’s a little scary.

And so Oh Hello Vintage was born.

Three weeks is an insane amount of time to launch a shop in, but I honestly think if it had been any longer I would have stressed about every little detail a million times over. I’m not saying I would EVER try and open a shop with such a tight deadline again – little tip, don’t arrange the opening party before you’ve started decorating, you’ll curse yourself for it – but the fact that we opened so quickly did take away a lot of the fear for me. Mostly because I didn’t have time to think about anything else other than getting the shop open!

Deciding to open my own vintage store wasn’t a difficult decision, because I’ve been thinking about this for as long as I can remember. Sure I worry about the current retail climate, costs, peoples spending habits, but I don’t want to look back and regret not trying something new.

“She was powerful

not because she wasn’t scared

but because she went on

so strongly despite the fear” – atticus