What do you get when you try opening an online vintage shop? If you’re Ghost town outfitters’ owner Parker Hayes, you get a line of people outside your warehouse.
Hayes never planned on having a physical store for his vintage clothing, but unbeknownst to him, that wasn’t really his decision to make. With a crowd of people lining up outside his warehouse every day, keeping the shop online just seemed irresponsible.
“It was never going to be a store. I wasn’t going to tell anybody about it. Then it was just one of those things where God had other plans. So I ended up getting in there, hanging out, doing my thing, and then a friend of mine said, ‘hey, we should do a TikTok video.’ So we did the TikTok video, and it was really bad in hindsight, but for whatever reason, it went viral. Then the following morning there were like 100 people outside the warehouse, then it just didn't stop.”
Hayes opened his first formal storefront shortly after this experience to a tremendous amount of support. At this location you can expect to find vintage clothing from a multitude of eras in the US.
Despite the stigma of vintage clothing costing an arm and a leg, Hayes sees value in keeping the prices down.
“I want to be able to prove that the vibe, good people, reasonable prices and not being so uptight about everything is a better model,” Hayes said. “It's kind of like that attracts people more and like, ‘hey, you know what? When you have a lot of stuff, you can give stuff away to people that need it, and that's okay.’”
Ghost town offers a wide variety of clothing for people of any age, gender, size, you name it. Although, at this store you’ll find it all bunched together, as Hayes has found clothing lacks a gender.
While the new physical location was great for selling clothes, Hayes saw more potential. As a former musician himself, he knows the struggles of finding venues to perform. With this in mind, Hayes decided to offer his store as a venue for local punk bands to perform at – with unexpected level of success.
“I played in a lot of bands back in the day and we toured hard. Lining up venues, targeting promoters, I mean the whole industry is challenging. It's always been part of the early 2000s and so I just thought it was pretty cool to have a tab in the space. I didn't think it would work quite as well as it did. So it wasn't necessarily like in the plan to make that focus, but I really just wanted to occasionally have shows.”
Throughout Ghost town’s lifetime, the store has always seemed to get bigger than Hayes ever thought. While the success is welcomed, Hayes is determined to keep the small-market vibe intact.
“It's like, you can go to Starbucks and they're gonna be like, ‘we're Starbucks, we're cool.’ But there's a coffee shop around the corner, owned by Stephen Carroll, and that place is chill and their coffee is way better, and the vibes are really good. It's not corporate, because it’s a real thing, you know, because people are putting some love into it. So I'm just trying to keep it in that realm,” Hayes said.
GHOST TOWN OUTFITTERS IS LOCATED AT 1040 Tyinn St #8, Eugene, OR 97402 AND 365 E 13th Ave, Eugene, OR