Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Pieces of the past
Entrepreneur finds unique history in vintage clothing.
It is a Wednesday afternoon, and local store owner Loren Long is hard at work behind the counter, tending to his customers eager to buy, sell or trade one-of-a-kind clothing at his store, Recollect Ltd., in Fayetteville.
He greets a customer as he walks up to the counter with a large tote bag in hand. The customer hands the bag to Long and explains he has some “insane items” that he wants to get off his hands. Long happily accepts the bag of clothing and begins analyzing each item as if they were fine jewelry.
As Long goes to work behind the counter, he begins by identifying any holes, stains or damaged items. He analyzes the tags, stitching and other details to understand the era of the item and the amount he is willing to offer.
Vintage guru, Long is like a walking encyclopedia when it comes to knowing the history of vintage items. For a 26-year-old, this entrepreneur has an old soul when it comes to rare items from the past.
He begins to get excited as he pulls from the tote bag a NASCAR T-shirt he immediately notices is from 1995. He explains that “you can tell the era by the way the screen printing is done… reprints just aren’t the same anymore, man.”
Long then goes on to sort through the rest of the tote bag hunting for new inventory. After looking through the customer’s goods, he picks three shirts out of the stack. “I can offer you 80 bucks for these three,” he says to the seller, who happily who accepts the offer.
Transactions like this happen daily at Recollect, where Long’s ability to analyze clothing from past decades comes second nature to him. “It’s always exciting to see the new items people bring in to sell every day… I love the history that each piece represents in here,” says Long. “Vintage clothes just make me happy.”
It’s hard to walk into Recollect without feeling like you’ve stepped into a very hip time capsule from the mid-1980s, an aesthetic Long worked hard to bring to life after years of selling out of his parents’ living room.
Around the store, racks are curated and filled with unique vintage threads from the 1980s and
’90s which are thoughtfully chosen and sometimes even restored by Long.
Long is always thinking about vintage. From bin diving at the Goodwill Outlet in Rogers to scouring the area’s flea markets and garage sales, he is always hungry for unique items.
The Recollect owner explains that it is not only him that contributes to the store’s success, his partner and co-owner Evan Soucy “is the yin to my yang when it comes to managing the day-to-day store operations. … He does the accounting and online work, and I focus on the vintage.”
The pair began working in retail together as parttime sales floor associates years ago at Finish Line. While gaining valuable retail and customer service experience working for a large company, the two realized their shared passion for vintage clothing and retail.
Walking through the store, Long shows off some of his favorite finds from a recent thrift shop haul. He’s almost giddy as he talks about the history of some of the vintage windbreakers hanging on the rack.
Grabbing an item off the shelf, he explains. “I found this ’90s Nike piece at an old lady’s garage sale last week.” After glancing down at the price tag, which reads $55, it’s obvious how much value some of these vintage items hold.
Soucy explains that the items in the store “aren’t just old hand-me-down shirts and jackets, but a nostalgic feeling of the past that the clothing brings to shoppers. … That’s what Loren sells here. Nostalgia.”
The pair agrees that the value of an item is “relative to the customer”; some items that are priceless to one are worthless to another. Considering this, Long is constantly on the lookout for new items to please his diverse customer base and keep up with growing demand.
Before the opening of his retail location on College Avenue, Long sold a majority of his items online, particularly on the Recollect Instagram page and Etsy store. “The operation was small, and I stored a majority of my inventory in my mom’s house,” he says, but the Recollect vintage store quickly grew as word spread around the region.
Long says he picked Fayetteville because “there was just kind of an opening for it. You know, there’s a lot of vintage spots in Fayetteville, but most of them are women’s [clothing] oriented, so there’s nothing really around here that does mostly guys’ stuff like us.”
While attending the University of Arkansas as a music education major, Long says he soon realized music was not the path he wanted to take, and instead he wanted to pursue his longtime dream of opening a clothing store that “people could hang out at.”
The store owner saw a gap in the market as a student and realized that aiming for a niche part of the resale market could become a profitable endeavor, “especially in a town populated by a large number of college students hungry for new vintage items to show off.”
He says that opening in a college town like Fayetteville was a great choice because “you have a builtin audience that is always turning over new customers. And there’s always people bringing new people in to you. So college towns are always good.”
Long also attributes his excitement for retail to “the fact that we get to just talk to all kinds of different people every day, but also there’s just always exciting stuff coming in. I love the history of the items and seeing clothes I’ve never seen before. You just never know what’s going to walk through the door.”
Grady Stracener, a regular customer of Recollect, says, “Loren’s passion for vintage is obvious in the way he carefully selects only the best items to put out.”
He points at the hat and vintage polo he’s wearing and says, “I bought this whole outfit here pretty much. Loren’s store is by far the best in the area, and it keeps me coming back weekly.”
The Recollect owner’s favorite item that he’s purchased is “a 1976 Leon Russell tour T-shirt, which was a pretty rare find that just walked in the door, you know? And that’s super fun to me. I love interesting stuff.”
(The Leon Russell shirt was priced at a whopping $100 on the Recollect website).
Not everything has been a “cake walk” for Long and his vintage business. He and Soucy acknowledge the challenges of opening their first retail store and the abundance of lessons they’ve learned.
In the early stages of being a store owner, “the biggest challenge was figuring out what our market was. When we opened up, we stocked the shelves with items that we thought were going to sell really well, [and] it ended up not being that way at all.”
After the trial and error of stocking the correct items for their store, Long “found our niche in terms of what sells in Fayetteville and just started expanding on those categories.”
In early March, the early stages of the covid-19 pandemic started to affect Long’s business. He was forced to shut down Recollect for two months after barely being open a year. This was a hard pill to swallow after the months of hard work put in by the pair and left him fearful for the future of his store.
Soucy says the experience “has been pretty rough. We have learned a lot about keeping our online income steady and are putting a lot of time into our website and social media,” which has been a lifeline for the small business.
Long decided to temporarily pivot the business and focus strictly on online sales during the beginning of the outbreak. Luckily, his plan worked, and Recollect was able to reopen with health measures in place in May and has continued to stay open with mask requirements.
The future of Long’s business looks promising as he hopes to expand Recollect into a larger retail space soon. Outgrowing their current store “is a good problem to have,” he says. The Recollect team plans to open a second store in Northwest Arkansas in the near future as the demand for vintage is on the rise. From his humble beginnings selling clothing from his parents’ house to choosing to open a store over pursuing a career in classical music, Long is in it for the long haul and is not looking back.
Riley Porcarello is a senior majoring in journalism with a focus in advertising/PR at the University of Arkansas. He plans to move to Southern California after graduation to work in the entertainment industry, specifically in music marketing. This story was written as part of a news feature writing class. Contact him at Riley porcarello@gmail.com.