A VINTAGE LOVESTORY – OUTOFUSEBERLIN

FRÄULEIN: You are finally in the starting blocks with the opening of your outofuseberlin showroom. How are you feeling at the moment?
SISSI & PAT: With the opening of our first homebase for outofuseberlin we have fulfilled a small dream. A room full of vintage pieces that we have carefully curated from our travels. A place where we can have face to face, interesting conversations with our customers and partners – with a glass of wine in the evening or during a spontaneous coffee chat at noon. It is important to us that we stay close to all those who accompany us on our way. Our vintage pieces need to be touched and tasted, each piece has a story to tell. This space can give us all that. In the future, we are planning pop-up stores with different brands and exhibitions with artists. Creativity on 25 square metres is exciting but definitely feasible.

You say yourself that outofuseberlin is a “love story with a heart full of vintage and rock’n’roll”. Where does the love for vintage fashion and rock’n’roll come from and why did you start to focus on vintage pieces, not only for outofuseberlin but also for your personal style?
What moves us – shapes us in the long run. Our work, the different vintage pieces we sell but also our very personal look. The 70s, for example, are very influential for our passion – music, fashion and the rebellious attitude of the youth that goes with it makes our heart beat faster. We didn’t invent selling vintage, we personalised it in a certain way. Because in our store you only find pieces that we would wear ourselves and that we furnish our home with. A very niche business way to escape mainstream and mass in our society.

outofuseberlin certainly makes vintage hearts beat faster! How did the idea come about?
We love to get up early at the weekend and discover new flea markets with our old scooter. That’s what sparked our great love for vintage. We just had a lot of fun looking for new unique pieces together and at the end of the day working up our haul – just creating something new that only we had. Little by little, more and more friends asked us if we could start looking for certain vintage pieces especially for them. That’s how the idea of founding outofuseberlin came about. We ourselves still love to see old pieces of jewellery on a new owner – three years after our foundation.

Why do you think Berlin is the optimal location for outofuseberlin?
When it comes to the online business around outofuseberlin, we could work from anywhere, as many of our clients come from all over the world. We have been living in Berlin for over 5 years, we know the audience and the market very well – so why not here where we are currently at home. There is no big plan behind it – it was just a coincidence that we got the opportunity to open this showroom. Berlin is very open and allows for a lot. Besides, Pat has been dreaming of such a place for a long time, we could only say yes to Berlin.

What were the biggest challenges in realising your store?
The space measures a modest 25 square metres – so we needed a precise plan, which we of course rethought a thousand times in order to come up with a result that met our requirements. There was no shortage of ideas, but to implement what we had in mind presented us with completely new challenges. Pat is very good at planning and Sissi loves to work with putty and mortar. We did a lot of the work ourselves, as it is difficult to explain an idea in detail to someone else. We sawed tables ourselves and sewed metre-long curtains with a lot of help from Pat’s mother. Our flat resembled a fabric warehouse and you had to watch where you stepped for weeks. We are also very happy that various artists have become part of the showroom. Our clothes rails were made by Charlot Van Geert  from Antwerp and are a highlight of the space. We also have large umbrella lamps mounted on the ceiling by interior designer Josephine Reich from Copenhagen. Always with the aim of creating a space that closely resembles our own home.

Why do you think vintage is experiencing such a revival right now?
We are all becoming more aware of the environment and its future. Awareness is building up and we realise how short-lived consumption can be. A purchase combined with positive emotions triggers a long-term satisfaction in us. With vintage we can pass on stories. There are so many products on the market that are still in perfect condition after so many years. For us as founders of outofuseberlin, buying a very special one-off piece is still an absolute feeling of happiness. In the long term, we think the trend is towards more minimalist shopping behaviour and more conscious decisions. We want to give the feeling that vintage pieces will continue to be a better alternative than buying new goods in the future.

What makes the vintage selection at outofuseberlin so special?
We only sell pieces that we ourselves would place in our home or see on us. This often makes it difficult to decide what will end up in the store and not in our own living room or wardrobe. Our assortment ranges from bags to great clothes, cool jeans to colourful Murano glass vases. Vintage design classics are mixed with no-name treasures from the 70s. We put punk buttons on delicate blouses or rough workwear jackets – if we love it, we can pass on the feeling.

You don’t only offer fashion, but also some interior pieces. Do you think that vintage pieces in general have the potential to satisfy not only the current need for sustainability but also the desire for individualism?
We want to give our customers the impulse to act sustainably when buying one of our products in a natural way. We would not claim to act one hundred percent sustainably in every situation. Our awareness of the environment and nature has developed further in recent years. We live more consciously – doing without many things that do not seem necessary to us. This is a feeling that we would like to pass on to our customers with outofuseberlin. The desire for individualism is nevertheless one of the most important reasons why our business model works. The combination of sustainability and individualism therefore opens up new paths and encourages us to consume less and to turn our gaze to what we can imagine on our side in the long term.

If you want to get inspired the showroom is located in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin.

All Images: Courtesy of outofuseberlin 
Interview by Annika Duda