Little Boxes Vintage LLC, a junkers story
The Village of Gays Mills, usually noted for the abundance of apple orchards, now offers visitors a taste of nostalgia in the Little Boxes Vintage LLC located in the Mercantile Center.
Owned and operated by Jimmy and Charissa Richter, the Richters are originally from Ohio and settled in Wisconsin by way of Colorado. The couple specialize in vintage items, many that are difficult to find. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, so let’s get back to the Ohio roots of the Richter’s.
The couple started in the business running vintage and antique shows for Charissa’s grandparents in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Northern Kentucky. Her grandparents started their business called Cannonball Express after her grandfather retired. Initially focusing on antique furniture, Charissa said her grandparents were collectors too and purchased a lot of items for their own personal collection as an investment for their retirement.
Enter Jimmy. “So, Jimmy came into the fold of my family and connected well with my grandfather. They'd hang out in the basement where all of my paw paw’s collection was. They would spend hours down there just going through things. Paw paw would put together a box for Jimmy to research, giving it to him saying, ‘find out everything you can about this and report back to me on current market value and the history of each piece’. So, Jimmy trained under him in that capacity. Yeah, so that's kind of where Jimmy found his love for it, through his relationship with my paw paw. It was pretty cool to watch. They're two very different people and you would never expect that they would mesh like they did.” Charissa said with a wide smile.
Soon, Jimmy and Charissa found themselves helping her grandparents out with the heavier work loading, unloading and setting up lower level (less expensive) items at various antique shows as they continued to learn about the antique business.
While honing their skills in the antique business, Jimmy professed he was a miserable social worker feeling stuck in his job, while Charissa was studying occupational therapy. All the while, they held on to a dream of living in Colorado.
Eventually, the Richters took the jump and moved out to Colorado bringing there antique dealing experience along, that would find them selling in Colorado Springs, Fort Collins, and Pueblo. “I'm a former concert promoter”, Jimmy said. “I swore it off for the rest of my life, and that lasted nine months, maybe six months,” he said laughing. “I started doing shows again and we put a festival together and met all these crazy musicians. The festival is ongoing with some friends back in Fort Collins called the Choice City Stomp Music Festival. Over years of Colorado filling up with people, to a ridiculous degree, we started to vacation here because some of those musicians we met were from the Driftless. All of a sudden, we were like, ’yeah, let's get a vacation home there’. Then, all of a sudden it was, ‘let's move there, you know because Colorado is full.’”
A year and a half ago, the Richters started looking for a place in the Wisconsin Driftless area right when the pandemic started to ramp up. Jimmy recalled last year they came out to the Driftless, and the only house on the market was a little house in Gays Mills that came on the market the day before they left back to Colorado. “We came to see the house, and we fell in love with Gays Mills, and man it's been kind of amazing ever since.”
Having bought their house and moved to Gays Mills, the Richters still have space in the Sweet William Antique Mall in Colorado Springs and travel there every couple of months to refill and rotate their antique stock.
Selling about 80% of their antique stock online through Etsy, the Richters keep around 900 items available for purchase at any one time. Acknowledging their goal is to list 1000 items, Jimmy said they sell so much on Etsy, it has been hard to reach that goal.
Storing so many items came with its own challenges though. Turns out that their home and more importantly their storage, aka the garage, was in a flood plain. Looking for climate-controlled storage space with electricity was a challenge. Luckily, a space had opened up in the Mercantile Center located in what locals refer to as the “new Gays Mills”, on the North end of town.
Jumping on the opportunity, Jimmy and Charissa weren't expecting to open a storefront so quickly, but it was available and it all kind of just clicked together for them. “We've just been kind of expanding ever since,” Charissa said.
By now you might be fielding the question -where do they find their antique stock? While they schedule private appointments with people selling antiques, much of their inventory comes from assessing estates. Having 15 years of antiques knowledge, the Richters are usually the first ones in to see what estates are comprised of. Jimmy said that having a counseling background has proven useful, helping people process possessions accumulated over decades, which he said can be overwhelming, especially when many items can have sentimental value that people may also have an emotional attachment to.
“Some people reach out to us wanting help processing an estate of a family member, or when they want to downsize their own estate or clear things out, and we find it is always fun to work with people on that personal level. You don't know folks or the stories behind certain items. Then, we can share that with people when we sell it to them. It makes it even more valuable,” Charissa said.
The word “pickers” is a commonly used term today that describes what the Richters do, but put the brakes on that word. Jimmy gave me the run down about that label.
“I call us Junkers, because in Appalachia, Southern Ohio, Northern Kentucky, West Virginia, parts of other states, it is still a bit of a slap in the face to call someone a picker. Even though that's a popular term, pickers were the people who came into town, bought your grandma's nice stuff, and kind of screwed you out of money. The word carries a very negative connotation. Paw paw used to make me wear a badge that said, ‘authorized junk dealer’ at every single show we did for them. We're born Junkers, I mean we still hit up estate sales, thrift stores, you know, where I do all the other sourcing that everyone else does, but a good day is when we get to be the first people to look at an estate”.
The Richters found people have been receptive to their business in the area, and rely on word of mouth and some advertising that they are buying and selling antiques. Jimmy said, “People will call us or bring in items for us to look at. I rarely have a Saturday somebody hasn't shown up with a large box of items, even if they're just trying to assess it or they want to get rid of it.”
Charissa said the community has been very receptive to Little Boxes Vintage. “It’s been nice. Everybody kind of told us, ‘You’ll get business through Apple season. That's when the crowds come through Gays Mills, but you know, it'll be pretty quiet the rest of the year’. But we've got great local support, even outside of apple season which was surprising to us, but in a good way.”
Every weekend has been strong for Little Boxes Vintage since opening about a month and a half ago. When visitors for apple season taper off in October, their busy season on their Etsy page kicks in, which helps keep the business going strong. Using multiple avenues to generate income, the Richters have set up booths with lower end rummage sale type items at the Village Greenhouse in Gays Mills and the Big Red Shed in Westby.
Just as interesting as how Jimmy and Charissa came to be in the Wisconsin Driftless, is how they came up with the business’s name. Jimmy shared, “Years ago, when we were in Fort Collins before we tried to start the business, I was racking my brain and I couldn't think of a good name for it. My brother, who had passed a few years ago, he sent me the song by Malvina Reynolds that Pete Seeger made famous, ‘Little Boxes’. My brother said, ‘Do you remember mom used to sing this to us is when we were little?’ I didn't remember at all. So, I listened to the song and it kind of came back to me briefly. I lost my mom at a young age, so it kind of just felt right. A lot of my love for junkin’ comes from me going to thrift stores and yard sales with my mom when I was little. It just kind of all came back to that, and we've moved twice now and kept the name the entire time. So, it's just been funny. Yeah, Little Boxes Vintage.”
It seems people are what drives the Richter’s love for being junkers, and the countless stories that are behind many of their finds. I asked them about the future of their business, Jimmy’s reply, well, heartwarming. “I love what I do, I mean I was miserable in social work, because I was getting beat down every day, and I got to the end of that job and felt like I wasn't helping anyone anymore. Then, I got turned on to this, and even on a bad day, it's what I want to do until I'm old, like very, very old. I would love to be 90 and still doing this. If Pyrex isn't selling, then we switch over to records. If records aren’t selling then we go back to concert t-shirts. There are so many aspects of it and somebody is always looking for something, and we get to hear and share people's stories. One of my favorite stories I often quote, is about a girl that came into our shop in Fort Collins looking for Pyrex bowls. I had the exact set that she used to make cookies with her grandma every Christmas. When her grandma passed, her cousin got them. It made her so sad, but a couple months later, I sold her those bowls. I even carried them to her car because she was crying so much. Around Christmas, I got photos in my email of her and her daughter making cookies with those bowls. We got to be part of that. I love it, I love that we get to be part of people's history and their future sometimes. Our goal, to just keep doing what we’re doing. We love it, and I mean it's our dream that's why we're here. I'm an okay businessman and I up our financial goals all the time. I would love to make it so that Charissa can stay at home and not go back into the medical field, and we could sustain 100% off of this but, you know, we're getting there.
The Richter’s six-year-old son Cecil, named after Charissa’s paw paw, has shown promise in the business as well. “Cecil, he's amazing,” both Jimmy and Charissa said. Jimmy added, “He loves pointing out antiques to me, he's like, ‘Hey Dad, that's an antique, you should go look at it’. He loves junking with us. It's so much fun.”
Jimmy and Charissa know Gays Mills may be a drive for some, but stressed there's a lot to see and explore in their store. “We try to make sure it's pretty heavily curated in our showroom,” Jimmy said.
After spending a few hours with the Richters, it dawned on me that anyone that visits Little Boxes Vintage LLC, has more than a browsing or shopping experience, but rather a human experience- an experience I hope never becomes an antique itself.
Little Boxes Vintage LLC hours are: Thursday-Sunday from 10-5pm or by appointment.
You can find Little Boxes Vintage LLC at their shop in Gays Mills at 120 Sunset Ridge Ave Suite 116 (In the Mercantile Building next to the Crawford County Independent Office) on Facebook, Etsy or Instagram under their name, by email at littleboxesvintage@gmail.com, or by a good old telephone call at 608-448-6880.
