Lifelong Love of Vintage Clothing Leads to Growing Business

Josette Elstad was 14 years old when she first became fascinated with women’s vintage clothing. Then a resident of St. Louis Park, she started acquiring her own vintage wardrobe.

Elstad’s love of vintage clothing has since grown beyond her own wardrobe. She now has her own full-time vintage clothes business, JoJo’s Retro and Vintage. She looks forward to opening a traditional retail outlet in downtown Hopkins someday but, for the time being, sells strictly online out of office space in Hopkins’ Excelsior Tech Center.

 “It serves as an office, a photography studio and storage area,” she said. “I do the photography right here, which we use for our webpage.”

Elstad, who lives in Minnetonka with her husband and two children, got a bachelor’s degree in theater and art and did some freelance costume design after college.

“After my second child was born, I stayed at home,” she said. “But knew I wanted to do something, especially something that was in an area of interest to me.”

She then stumbled upon Etsy—an e-commerce website focused on handmade or vintage items, as well as arts and craft supplies.

“Between what I learned on Etsy, and also with the encouragement of some friends who knew about my interests, I decided to open JoJo’s,” she said.

That was in May 2010. Since then, she’s had roughly 500 sales and more than 90 thousand hits on her website. Her husband, Chad, is now designing a new website.

Most vintage clothes buyers are women in their 20s, 30s and 40s, and Elstad has customers from all over the world.

“Besides the U.S., France, Britain and Australia are countries where vintage and retro are quite popular,” she said.

Elstad handles all this business herself.

“I hire all the models, do all the photography and all the model make-up. I do roughly two to three photo shoots a month,” she said.

She even edits the photos, does the web site copy, posts all photos and information and even handles shipping and handling.

Elstad uses sites like Craigslist to find vintage clothes to stock and goes to local garage sales to look for items. She also visits Cat’s Pajamas—a twice-annual vintage clothing, jewely and textile show and sale at the state fairgrounds.

Vintage and retro women’s clothing is more popular than ever, Elstad said.

“Television shows like Mad Men and Pan Am have done a lot to highlight vintage and retro,” she said.

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To shop at JoJo's, log on to http://www.etsy.com/shop/jojosretroandvintage.