Shopp ’Til You Drop
Jasmin Shopp grew up in a small town where all the teenagers wore American Eagle. She wore hand-me-downs from one of her eight older siblings. Jasmin was wearing vintage before she even knew what vintage was.
The outside of The Vintage Shoppe at 220 N Walnut St. in the heart of Downtown Muncie. Jasmin and her family now live in the building full-time.
Now, as a mother of four girls, Jasmin owns Vintage Shoppe in downtown Muncie, Indiana just about thirty minutes away from her American Eagle-clad high school. The Shoppe is the prime destination to find curated vintage for Muncie locals. Although Jasmin is back in her home state to raise her daughters and run her business, she has lived all over the country.
“Right after high school, I graduated and just got out of Indiana,” she says. “I was like screw this place. I will never, ever come back.” She lived in Florida for three years, Atlanta for three more, and worked at the port in Long Beach, California for a few years. “And then things changed,” she says. “I went away and found out that people are the same everywhere, they really are. Especially in Florida and California, they’re just tanner.”
Jasmin always had an eye for style. “I would wear weird stuff to school and people were like ‘That’s weird.’ But they loved it. My locker was always just full of clothes.” She used fashion magazines as inspiration when she would shop for clothes. “I used to get magazines from the grocery store and try to replicate the outfits that I would see the models wearing.”
Some of the items in the back room of the Shoppe. Jasmin often puts together outfits for customers on hangers, an artful choice that bodes well for the store’s aesthetic.
But how can a teenager afford to replicate supermodel style? To Jasmin, the answer was always vintage. “I hated going to school wearing the same thing people were wearing, so I started shopping at Goodwill at a really young age.”
She was introduced to thrift stores because it was what her family could afford, but the stores and the clothing inside them meant something more to Jasmin. “I just always really loved it, I always really loved fashion,” she says.
So, when Jasmin came back to Muncie in 2009 to take care of her father after her mother passed away, she began to see an opportunity to do something for the community. “I saw a college town with no vintage store,” she tells me. “I’d lived in all those large cities and there was vintage everywhere.” She bought a newly renovated building down the street from the city high school that was built as a car dealership in 1916. “We got really lucky,” she says, referring to herself and her partner. “We had just bought a house and had to rent it to pay for this building, but we knew we could do it because I knew I could have the store.”
“I feel like I manifested it,” she says. Jasmin seems to have always had an entrepreneurial spirit. She had been working for start-ups, banks, and in the restaurant business for years. All she had to do was find the right location for the store. “I’m really into manifesting, it works. I’ve taught my kids and they’re really good.” Earnestly, she leans in and says, “My eight-year-old manifests all the time.”
Her children, it seems, are her world. She is a mother first, and a shop-owner second. “I’m more of a full-time mom, and I homeschool too,” she says, explaining her full-time gig. Vintage Shoppe is only open two days per week. “Sometimes I get kind of behind on that stuff, but I’m done having babies,” she says, smiling at her infant daughter in her arms.
Jasmin has made such an impact on the community that customers come in just to see her. “They would come in to talk to me and I wasn’t here. I’m like ‘I’m sorry I just keep having babies!’” she says. Now that she’s settled in with her four kids, Jasmin plans to open the Shoppe back up four days per week. “The kids are going to be here all the time too,” she says. “They love the store so they’re going to grow up in it and we plan on having it forever. It’ll be their store one day.”
For Jasmin, fashion is intergenerational. It is about passing down hand-me-downs that have lived a life of their own before they got to her, it is about finding timeless pieces and the perfect denim that never goes out of style.
This is something her grandmother passed down to her. “My grandmother was kind of a tomboy, but she was like, supermodel pretty,” she tells me. “She carried a wallet in her back pocket, but she wore a lot of jewelry and fancy shoes and blazers. She was just like her own thing.” Her grandmother’s confidence in her identity and self-expression left a lasting impact on Jasmin and the Shoppe.
She still gets most of her clothes from the store from estate sales, although she just began a vintage exchange with members of the community every Thursday. “I recently ran out of most of my stuff,” she says, referencing one estate sale where she hit the jackpot.
She bought $150 worth of clothing from a woman who had three daughters and seemed to buy the same pieces in every color for herself and each child. “I got really lucky. I paid a lot of money for that and it literally lasted me five years, but all my boxes are gone so I’m on the hunt for more stuff.”
Jasmin’s collection changes almost every weekend. She is constantly posting new items in the store on Vintage Shoppe’s Instagram page, @thevintageshoppetag
It is harder to find and sell unique pieces now than it once was with the rise in popularity of thrifting and vintage clothing. However, Jasmin still thinks she has a leg up. She opened the store seven years ago and knows she has changed the city for the better. “It gives people a place to go,” she says. “You don’t have to sift, and you don’t have to go to Goodwill and spend two hours and maybe find one thing.”
But to Jasmin, young people’s newfound interest in sustainable shopping is about more than just being eco-friendly and saving money, although those two things are a very important part of her store. It is about that same reason she fell in love with vintage clothing in the first place. “A lot of it is just the uniqueness,” she says. “When I was little, that’s what I wanted. I didn’t want to wear what everyone was wearing.”
Vintage Shoppe has all sorts of customers. There are stylish college girls who come in looking for the perfect pair of baggy Levi’s jeans, parents on their way to one of the many bars and breweries downtown looking for the best vintage t-shirt, or anyone looking to check out a family-owned, sustainable local business.
Jasmin does not care who comes into the store. To her, the Shoppe is more about how people feel when they leave. “For me, it’s about making people happy. It’s about making return customers.”
Her low prices are part of what keeps customers coming back. Sustainable fashion is about more than just reducing carbon emissions, it is about sustainable pricing that allows the world of fashion and clothing to be accessible to all consumers.
“I can sell one sweater for sixty dollars, but that person may never come back. But if I sell it for twenty dollars, they’re like, ‘I’m definitely going back.’ I’ve heard people say, ‘My favorite item I’ve ever found in your store was in the free bin,’” she says.
Jasmin has owned Vintage Shoppe for seven years, and she does not plan on going anywhere. The growth and development of her store is a testament to how hard she works to bring vintage to Muncie.
Vintage Shoppe is also about building community with customers, with the city, and within fashion. Jasmin saw a college town without a vintage store, but she also saw a post-industrial city with a suffering downtown with buildings that were closed or abandoned. But downtown Muncie is on the rise — in part due to Jasmin’s store on North Walnut Street.
“Muncie really is a hidden gem, a lot of people don’t realize that,” she says. “When I was little I remember saying to my parents, ‘Why do people go on vacation and not explore their own place?’ There are so many amazing things here that people don’t realize and it’s kind of sad.”
Jasmin’s store and her story are a love letter to a community, to the environment, to her daughters, and to fashion that never goes out of style. Her store keeps people coming back. It brings a joyful kind of thrifting that was missing in Muncie just seven short years ago.
“You can come here and buy something that is truly unique,” she says. “And it’s proven itself. It’s lasted this long and you can get it for 12 dollars!”
ABOUT THE WRITER
Maggie Connolly is a recent graduate of the College of the Holy Cross where she studied Political Science and Creative Writing. She is interested in fashion, beauty, culture, and politics and wants to explore how these topics intersect as a writer. She is particularly interested in slow, sustainable fashion because of its connection to political and social change. She believes in creating content through a lens of social justice and is particularly interested in writing pieces that make young women and girls feel heard and valued. Maggie was born and raised in Muncie, Indiana and is a proud Hoosier, but she will be relocating to New York City in early 2022.