Out with the new, in with the old. Sardines Vintage Collective, a new vintage clothing store, is opening on S. Delaware Avenue in Bay View on June 8.
The store will sell curated secondhand clothing from eight different sellers under one roof. It will also sell books from Milwaukee-based Mushroom Books and vinyl from Lilliput Records.
Sardines is the second vintage shop in Milwaukee of fiances and business partners Nate Fleege and Andrea Dolter, who opened To Hell & Back Vintage and Repair in Walker’s Point in August.
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“The vintage community in Milwaukee is really special to us here at To Hell & Back, as is the city itself. Since moving to MKE, we have wanted to open a vintage collective in order to show those two things off,” the store shared in an Instagram post.
Over the last six months, Fleege and Dolter have gathered some of their closest colleagues from the local vintage-selling community to bring a new vintage shopping experience to the city.
Fleege and Dolter refer to each of the participating sellers as “sardines.” And like the tiny tin of namesake fish, the store is packed with an eclectic mix of vintage finds.
The store’s owners discovered their passion for vintage clothing before meeting each other in Denver in 2018. Together, they began selling their finds online and in pop-up shops before moving to the Midwest and breaking into Milwaukee’s vintage scene in with their first store.
“We started working towards having our own store because that was always a dream that we had, and alongside that, really, we saw this lack of community space for selling,” Dolter says.
According to Dolter, Milwaukee has a large vintage community, but it doesn’t have a lot of visibility. Most independent vintage sellers in the Milwaukee area work online through Instagram or Depop and the occasional flea market and pop-up.
For Fleege and Dolter, the opening of two vintage stores in less than a year is a stepping stone both for them and for the city’s vintage scene. While To Hell & Back features the owners’ own collection, Sardines provides a space for other local sellers to present their personal style and ideas of what vintage means. Each seller is someone Fleege and Dolter have met since moving to Milwaukee.
“We picked everyone because we think they have great style, great taste. We want them to be themselves and do what they’ve already been doing — just in here,” Nate explains.
Juuj Ruka, one of the participating sellers and owner of Every Other Day, says that the pair “has given a lot of space for us to all bring in our own ideas and help make it be the full picture and not just thrown expectations at us of very direct things.”
“It’s really exciting here because I don’t even know what I’m going to find in here,” Dolter says.
Sardines’ mission goes beyond growing Milwaukee’s vintage community. Fleege and Dolter hope that the store also helps change customer perspectives on buying clothes.
“We’re really wanting to get people to shop in person more,” Fleege says. “It’s so easy to buy everything online and not associate with what you’re buying and who you’re buying it from.”
The vintage collective opened its doors for a soft launch from May 22-26. The owners attribute much of the shop’s initial success to its vendors, who all had followings of their own before partnering with the shop.
“Because we have all built up our community and built it up as a top priority for each of us,” Ruka says, “now as a unit … it makes all the difference to value that and not disregard that.”
Sardines will open on June 8, and its hours are from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.
