Closing Vintage Drift SLC on 900 South. 1 year later.

A year ago, I closed the doors to Vintage Drift on 900 South.

Even writing that sentence feels strange, because “closed” doesn’t quite describe what happened.

Vintage Drift wasn’t something I was ready to walk away from. I had signed another lease believing I was building the next chapter of a business I had spent years growing. Instead, circumstances outside of my control meant leaving the space much sooner than I had planned.

There was no graceful wind-down. No carefully planned final season. No big goodbye party that wrapped everything up neatly.

There was inventory to move. Decisions to make quickly. Anger, disappointment, exhaustion and a lot of uncertainty about what came next.

For a while, I wasn’t sure what Vintage Drift would look like without the storefront.

What 900 South Meant to Me

Vintage Drift had existed in different forms long before 900 South.

What started as Kissing Whiskey Vintage on Etsy in 2019 eventually became markets, pop-ups and, finally, a physical store. By the time I landed on 900 South, the idea had grown far beyond selling vintage clothing.

I wanted to build a shop where people who sometimes felt excluded from traditional vintage spaces could walk in and find something for them.

That meant carrying broader sizing. It meant supporting local artists and upcyclers.

It meant creating a space where queer people felt explicitly welcome.

It meant hosting events, working with community organizations and trying to prove that a small retail business could be both commercially interesting and deeply rooted in its community.

“Vintage Style, Not Vintage Values” became more than a tagline. It became the easiest way to explain what I wanted Vintage Drift to stand for. The storefront gave all of that a physical home. Losing it hurt, alot.

The Part Nobody Sees (But I Won’t Shut Up About)

Closing a small business location doesn’t just mean locking the door. It means figuring out where hundreds of pieces of inventory are going to live. Is it worth storing? It means losing the routines and daily rituals built around a physical space. I miss walking down the side of the 900 south storefront on a sunny morning, seeing the neighborhood come alive.

It means customers asking where you went. Every conversation with an old friend asking “How is your store?” and deciding to launch into storymode or not.

It means watching something you spent years creating suddenly become boxes, racks and storage units. Gosh that was impossibly hard.

It also means confronting your own identity. For years, I could point to a storefront and say, “This is what I built. This is what I do.”

When the storefront disappeared, I had to figure out whether I still believed that without a physical address attached to it. The last year has included plenty of moments where I questioned what I wanted my relationship with vintage retail to look like going forward. Running a small business is already difficult. Running one after something goes dramatically off course requires a different kind of energy I’m not sure I knew I had in me.

Sometimes resilience looks impressive, or really pathetic - from the outside. It genuienely depends on the day.

A lot of the time, it’s actually putting one rack back together, answering one email, doing one market, selling one piece and deciding to keep going.

The thing I’m proudest of is that losing the storefront didn’t mean losing the community around it.

I kept doing events. I kept working with other vintage sellers, artists, organizers and small businesses. I kept finding ways for Kissing Whiskey Vintage and Vintage Drift to exist outside of four walls.

Some of my favorite parts of this business have always happened outside the store anyway: vintage markets, Pride events, collaborations, pop-ups, conversations with customers and the strange little network of people you build when you’ve been part of the same creative community for years.

Over the last year, I’ve also had space to think more seriously about what I’m actually good at.

It turns out that building the store was only one version of that.

I love creating experiences. I love connecting businesses and people. I love finding overlooked ideas and figuring out how to make them work.

I love retail, but I also love events, marketing, community building, partnerships and helping businesses figure out how they belong in a place.

Those interests have started opening doors I probably wouldn’t have walked through if all of my energy was still going toward keeping one storefront running.

Success Doesn’t Always Look Like You Plan

There was a version of my life where I assumed success meant Vintage Drift getting bigger.

A bigger store. More inventory. More employees. Now I’m not sure that’s the only definition I’m interested in. Sometimes success is realizing that something can change without disappearing. The last year has reminded me that a business can be a storefront, but it can also be a collection, a community, an event, an idea or a reputation you spent years building.

Kissing Whiskey Vintage still exists.

Vintage Drift still exists.

And I’m still here.

I’ve learned more about contracts, partnerships, retail, marketing, events, leadership and myself than I ever wanted to learn in one year.

Some lessons were expensive, some were painful, some have already led somewhere better.

What Comes Next

I don’t know if Vintage Drift will ever look exactly like it did on 900 South again.

I actually hope it doesn’t. If I build another physical space someday, I’ll build it with everything I know now.

For the moment, I’m enjoying letting this next version take shape without forcing it to recreate the past.

I’m still sourcing, collecting and still obsessed with vintage. I’m still building and supporting the Utah vintage community in every way I know how, and one of the best parts of this last year has been realizing that I don’t have to do all of it alone.

You can currently shop my collections alongside other incredible vintage sellers at Oliver & Princess Natasha in Salt Lake City.

So if you’ve missed digging through my racks, finding something weird, talking vintage with me or supporting Kissing Whiskey Vintage and Vintage Drift, the story isn’t over, it just looks a little different now.

Thank you to everyone who shopped at Vintage Drift, backed our IndieGoGo came to an event, sold with me, collaborated with me, told a friend about the store, shared a post, bought something online, checked in after we closed or continued supporting what I was building even when I wasn’t entirely sure what I was building next.

A year later, I can finally look back at 900 South with more gratitude than grief.

I’m proud that it existed, I’m so proud of what happened there.

And I’m even more curious and excited about what comes next!


XoXO
Kristen, Kissing Whiskey Vintage