Even before she had the vocabulary for it, Katie Echeverry was an entrepreneur. Growing up in Burbank, California, she had a paper route and worked at a fish store to earn spending money.
“I learned at a very young age to hustle,” she says.
After graduating college, she wanted a job where hard work meant a bigger paycheck. She found sales to be a good fit, especially pharmaceutical sales, where she got a company car and could work from home.
But every evening when the clock struck 5, she had free time on her hands – time for making an extra buck, she thought. So she started playing around with the idea of a side gig.
“[My friends and I] used to go to garage sales and thrift just for funsies,” she says.
What if she turned that hobby into a vintage shop called Unique Vintage?
This was in the year 2000, in the early days of the internet and e-commerce. A friend’s boyfriend built her a website for free, and she spent her downtime digging through racks of old clothes. She’d mark up a dress she found for, say, $5 to $35, and post a photo on her site.
“It took me six months to get my first order,” she says. “But once that happened, I was totally hooked.”
Growing Out of the Garage
As months flew by, she was making a little money and having a lot of fun, building the business up in her garage. Around year three, a consumer fashion magazine named Unique Vintage a favorite spot to shop, and sales went from $1,000 a month to $5,000.
“That got my attention,” Echeverry says. “I was like, wait a second – could this actually be my job?”
It took two more years before she took a "leap of faith," she says, to focus on the store full-time. By then, she’d gotten married and was on maternity leave from her sales job. Her garage – and closets – were packed to the gills with clothes, and sales were still growing.
Her first hire was her child's babysitter – who happened to be a college student studying fashion and merchandising. She also hired her father to help with shipping. Next she found an intern. That’s when she opted to move the business to a rented office space in Burbank: that way, employees wouldn't have to enter her home.
It took me six months to get my first order. [...] But once that happened, I was totally hooked.
—Katie Echeverry, founder and CEO, Unique Vintage
With a few years of experience under her belt, Echeverry was spotting trends. Sales always picked up in April, for example, when high schoolers shopped for 1950s dresses to wear to prom. Too often, they were disappointed to learn vintage clothing sizes were limited – and often quite small.
“Vintage was so tiny, and America is growing,” says Echeverry. “I realized I could hardly find even a size six in anything, let alone a size 8, 10, 12. I was like, 'This is not fair for my plus-size girls.'”
That’s how she got the idea to evolve from selling vintage clothing to selling her own line of “vintage-inspired” clothing, which could be manufactured in all sizes.
Poised for Growth
Echeverry knew her shoppers wanted bold, bright, fun, out-of-the box items from the 1920s through 1970s. Now she no longer had to shop for those: she could have her manufacturing partner make them. She’d send photos of vintage dresses she loved and make suggestions, like add a pocket or change the collar. Weeks later, hundreds of dresses would arrive – from extra small to 5X – ready for sale.
Positioned for even greater growth, she transformed her office space in Burbank into a retail store in 2010. She also rented warehouse space nearby to store clothing and process online orders, which still make up the bulk of her business today, and she hired sales associates and more people who could help her pack and ship.
Around this time, Echeverry also started considering selling wholesale. Almost weekly, she received emails from other stores inquiring about selling her clothing. So she attended the fashion trade show MAGIC in Las Vegas, where she met scores of buyers and shop owners. Before long, she was selling to nearly 500 small boutiques around the world.
As the enterprise grew, so did the pressure to be a strong business leader. Echeverry, who had always seen herself as a friend to her employees, knew she had a lot to learn. So she became a member of Vistage, an executive coaching organization that paired her with a group of CEOs who would mentor her and act as her board of directors.
“That was the best thing I ever did, because they really taught me how to be a CEO,” she says.
One of the most important lessons they taught her was to employ people smarter than her in their own field. So she hired people in-house to handle her accounting, marketing, and website, as well as fashion design, sample-making and more.
At the height of her business, monthly revenue was in the seven figures and she had more than 100 employees. It wasn’t until around 2008, nearly eight years after opening her business, that she spent any marketing, purchasing ads on a celebrity blog and in a magazine.
“The internet was growing at such a fast pace at that time, [which] meant I was growing,” she says. “Being an early adopter, I think, drove the business.”
A Sign of the Times
Unique Vintage thrived even in times when it could have buckled, like during the Great Recession and the pandemic. For 22 years, the company grew profitably, and Echeverry continued reinvesting those profits in the store. There were years when Unique Vintage was named one of Newsweek’s Best Online Shops and included in the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies. But recently, economic uncertainty has shaken the business.
“Just now, I'm facing my first headwinds,” says Echeverry.
Like many business owners, Echeverry planned for growth in 2022. Then, consumer habits changed coming out of the pandemic. Her sales took a big hit, and she’s had to cut expenses and downsize: she's now down to 55 employees. Additionally, she recently made the tough decision to close her brick-and-mortar store, which started losing money for the first time in 2023 after moving to a higher-rent location (the building that housed the original store was sold in 2021). Now, she's sticking with her online roots.
She says it’s been tough, but the last 23 years have made her a confident business owner who knows her industry, team, customers, and strengths. Since 90% of her business has been online, she says she remains optimistic.
“It’s flexing me and growing me in different ways I didn't have to grow while things just worked,” she says. “But I also feel like I'm earning my CEO stripes. Because I understand my financials and business better than I ever have. When things get better in the next 18 months or so, we’ll be stronger for it.”
