Taking Pants Offline

Born Again Clothing’s Rags-to-Britches Tale Turns From Internet

By CHRISTOPHER KEOUGH

Contributing Reporter

For Sale: One 7,200-square-foot industrial building in Vernon, 14,000 pieces of recycled clothing, one URL (vintagetrends.com) with e-commerce infrastructure in place, 1 & #733; full-time employees. Asking price: undisclosed, but be prepared to pay a lot.

Despite swearing that he believes the Internet is emerging as the future of the vintage clothing industry, Born Again Clothing Inc. owner Derek Banton is selling the online store that sells his products.

Over the last 18 months, Banton said his vintagetrends.com has had between 1,700 and 2,300 hits a day and sales of between $28,000 and $30,000 per month. That’s a pretty nice revenue stream, but a mere trickle compared with Born Again’s overall revenues, which he expects will hit $12 million by the June 30 close of fiscal 2004.

It’s no wonder Banton wants to download the Web site, said Gale Daikoku, research director with GartnerG2 in San Jose. Maintaining separate online and offline retail operations has already proven to be an expensive and faulty approach, he said.

Retail giants such as Kmart Corp. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. originally operated e-commerce and brick-and-mortar operations separately before bringing them under the same umbrella. The reason: virtual stores virtually double overhead.

Banton acknowledged as much.

“Time and money, you know. It’s an investment in people,” he said. “I can only split myself up so many times.”

The ideal situation for Banton would be to sell the whole operation with an agreement that he could supply inventory as sales progress.

“I can make money and then I can supply it,” Banton said. “Maybe somebody wants to invest more money into marketing it and make it bigger.”

Marketing would be necessary for vintagetrends.com to succeed. Banton has used search engines and pop-up ads to market the site, but the URL only appears among the sponsored links in a Google search for “vintage clothes.”

That’s a limitation for an online store in a niche market that relies on people happening across it while surfing for other things.

“It’s not like it’s an Amazon or an eBay name where there’s traffic already,” Daikoku said.

The sale of vintagetrends.com would allow him to return his focus to Born Again’s core business. He and his brother, Greg, co-founded Born Again Clothing after immigrating from South Africa in the late 1980s.

The brothers started buying bales of used clothing and, with the help of their sister, Janice, refashioned them by sewing on pieces of leather from a belt business they had started.

Recycled clothes hand-me-downs, essentially have been around forever, although it has emerged as big business in recent years. Banton said some of the market has been taken by Internet auction sites.

“Today everybody’s wise with eBay,” he said. “If they see something (valuable) they want to put it up themselves and sell it.”

That’s why Banton thinks vintage trends.com will find a buyer and why he’s willing to give it up.

“I’ll sell anything for a price, you know,” he said, adding he’s not giving the property away. “I’m not asking for cheap money.”