Vintage & Vino: How we built a company from nothing

Hi friend,

I'm so glad you're here.

I spent a few days in London recently and got to catch up with Arthur, my ex-cofounder. We hadn't seen each other in years, and it stirred up everything: because once upon a time, the two of us (plus one more French friend and a lot of wine) built a company in that city out of absolutely nothing.

So this month I want to tell you that story. Fashion Stack is about fashion and the technology reshaping it, and to me that has always included the people who try to build something new inside the industry. I'm one of them. Let's start at the beginning.

Let me set the scene. It's 2022. I've been living in London for two years, I've just been laid off from a tech job, and I'm asking myself the big question: what next?

One thing I knew for sure: I wanted to follow my passions, fashion and fashion tech, and I had this gut feeling that it was my time to experiment.

Here's something about me: I'm obsessed with vintage and secondhand fashion. Almost everything I own is vintage and one of a kind. (I'll go deeper on that in another issue.) And for years, my friends were genuinely surprised by my finds — because secondhand still carries so many misconceptions. That it's dirty. That it looks shabby. That it's just not trendy enough. That always stuck with me, and somewhere along the way I knew I wanted to do something about it...

So one evening I invited two of my French friends over and we started brainstorming. We bounced ideas back and forth, and a few hours and a few glasses of wine later, we'd created the concept of Vintage & Vino.

Let me walk you through how it came together.

The gap we saw

Secondhand shopping in London was everywhere and nowhere. It lived online, across Vinted and Depop, or in the shops and markets around Brick Lane — but there was no curated experience around it. Nowhere for people who love sustainability, art, and fashion to actually meet, in real life, outside of a pub.

And coming from Paris, where I was used to beautiful, curated events, I found the London social scene frustratingly narrow: pubs… and nightclubs. That was the opening.

That's how Vintage & Vino was born.

What a night actually looked like

We picked atypical venues across London — hotel spaces, trendy cafés — and designed a whole experience inside them. A curated vintage pop-up, a natural wine bar, a dancefloor, a DJ. The whole idea was to give guests several experiences in one space: you could shop the curated secondhand pop-up (handpicked by yours truly), discover and taste natural wines with Arthur at the bar, share a bottle with friends, or just let loose and dance and meet someone new. All of it in one beautifully designed room. People came for the music, the fashion, and the connection.

We'd usually start around 4 or 5pm and wrap by midnight, which, for a crowd in our late twenties and early thirties, was the perfect window: a real night out, and still home and in bed before midnight. (No notes.)

Now, the entrepreneur hat

Here's how we decided to actually go for it — using a simple framework. The DVF Framework. (Nothing to do with Diane von Fürstenberg, my friends...) It stands for Desirability, Viability, Feasibility, paired with evidence-based validation. If you have an idea you want to test, I really recommend it — it doesn't have to be complicated.

• Desirability: Secondhand culture is huge and well established in London. So are wine bars. People wanted this.
• Viability: A B2C model: partner with event venues, sell tickets, drinks and clothing.
• Feasibility: We had the skills between us. Me in fashion and sales, Baptiste in hospitality and venue connections, Arthur in the wine industry. We were set.
• Validation: We talked to friends, and they loved it. Our logic was simple: if 50 of our own friends showed up, that was a good start. In the end, more than 400 strangers came to our events.

What we built and what it taught me

I learned that I can do anything. There's a specific feeling that comes from building something out of absolutely nothing, and from knowing you have that in you. It was the best school I could have asked for. (And I say that having paid 30k for an actual business school. Ahem.)

It also taught me more than any classroom could about why people buy: being there in the room, watching people react, talking to them. That was the real customer insight.

If you take one thing from this issue, let it be this: anyone can build. Anyone can start something. And honestly, I'll go further: I think everyone should start something, at least once.

Vintage & Vino was one of many adventures I've been lucky to have. But building it in London, from nothing, is one of the most beautiful gifts of my life.

So why isn't it still running? After a few successful editions, we had so many plans: more events, an online wine shop, a thousand new ideas. But I moved back to Paris, and running V&V remotely while building Meyi, my other startup, just wasn't possible. So we closed the chapter and went on to new things.

Which brings me back to Arthur. He's just opened a beautiful wine bar in Hackney called Blinds: excellent food, perfect wine selection! He gave me the tour and told me how he found the space, built the whole project, and where he wants to take it next. Vintage & Vino was his first entrepreneurial adventure, and now he has his own wine bar. I'm so proud of him!! (If London's on your list, add Blinds to it.)

So... Arthur, should we do a Vintage & Vino event in Berlin soon?

— Lauren

Fashion Stack is a personal project. Views are my own.