'We want a vintage store in every major city in the world'

CHARLIE Oxley and Freddie Rose were part of what they dub“ the charity shop brigade” when they met as students at Newcastle in 2015.

- Lucy Tobin

“We were on a student budget but wanting to have our own identity and wear unique clothes, and the charity shops in the city were silly cheap,” Rose grins. “We’d meet up with friends and go to ‘fill a bag’ or ‘kilo sales’ to find new things to wear, and people started to wonder, because we were on a budget, how we kept mixing up our wardrobes.”

They bonded over their love of preloved fashion, and today that passion has spawned a £1.5 million turnover vintage business with a Covent Garden store and presences in Selfridges, Adidas and other big brands.

Initially, though, the friends — both now 30 — graduated into other roles: Rose worked in sports marketing, Oxley at a boiler start-up.

“We kept on thrifting and started to realise that we had the perfect skillsets to build a business,” Rose says. Vintage Threads was launched as a side hustle, selling pre-loved fashion initially online “via a WordPress site that a friend set up in a few hours in 2016. We wanted to bring vintage to new audiences and promote the sustainable benefits.”