Photograph by Martha Williams
Out with the new, and in with the old: Vintage shoppers, thrifters, and connoisseurs of midcentury-modern furniture all feel strongly that “dated” items were made better than the latest products. Older pieces, especially clothing and housewares, were built to last for years rather than the next fashion cycle. And if you look in the right places, you’ll spend a fraction of what you’d pay for brand-new items, all while embracing sustainability.
“I love things but I hate waste,” says Dara Schaier, the Atlanta-based entrepreneur behind Mysterious Vintage, a shopping experience that combines sustainability and surprise. “So a business centered around vintage and secondhand objects just felt right to pursue. I was also thinking about creating a shopping experience where the act of getting the thing is just as fun as the actual thing.”
In her own life, Schaier realized she often had to choose between spending money on items or experiences: “It just occurred to me, why couldn’t you have both?” So she incorporated her love of mysteries, games, and surprises into secondhand shopping and launched Mysterious Vintage in March 2024.
Photograph by Martha Williams
Half of the retail space is adorned with slips of paper, each printed with an alphanumeric code, clue, and item cost. Each mystery item has an individual clue, such as “elegant, peaceful, and useful,” “Grand Canyon,” or “gift for a teacher.” Shoppers pick their favorite clue and head to a wall of storage cubbies lined with numbered bins. A staff member helps each shopper match the clue to the corresponding bin, which contains a wrapped item—the answer, if you will. No matter whether you keep it for yourself or gift it sight unseen, the object has an undeniable element of surprise. The handwritten clues are vague enough so the game can’t be reverse engineered. “It’s a gamble—you really don’t know what it’s gonna be,” Schaier says. “It could be any number of vintage things that we sourced from estate sales and thrift stores.”
Despite that gamble, or perhaps because of it, Mysterious Vintage resonates with shoppers. “People have sent me Instagram messages saying, ‘Thanks. You really brightened my day,’” Schaier says. “And it’s made me feel like I’m onto something that brings people joy.”
Photograph by Martha Williams
Mysterious Vintage began as a pop-up, often appearing at GVG Events’ outdoor markets. People loved the choose-your-own-adventure concept, and Mysterious Vintage quickly snagged a home in Ponce City Market’s Citizen Supply. From there, Schaier says, the power of Ponce City Market as a marketing engine has been a “complete and utter whirlwind.”
Schaier now has a second location in Mother Lode Vintage in Decatur and has launched a website to explore Mysterious Vintage’s potential as an e-commerce experience.
“There’s already so many things existing in the world: Let’s give some other object a second chance before we consume something else,” Schaier says. “There’s this unique aspect to some of these items and the time periods and places that they were made.”
This article appears in our February 2025 issue.
Advertisement
