Meet the Brand: Vintage Cuse
Lauren Levin, the Creator of Vintage Cuse and VintageU | Photo Courtesy of Vintage Cuse
Over the past few years, Lauren Levin has developed an eye for Syracuse spiritwear. Her Instagram feed alone bleeds orange, featuring everything from oversized ’80s style bombers to baseball jerseys, Otto the Orange pants, and a rare ’Cuse X Flintstones crossover sweater. Take a closer look, however, and a simple scroll makes it clear that Levin’s clothing brand, Vintage Cuse, is more than just a place to find the latest and greatest tailgate gear. This isn’t a quick shop for sloppily cropped shirts found in some corner on Marshall Street. Rather, it’s a fully developed brand that provides curated vintage clothing for the next generation of proud Syracuse students.
With SU once ranked as the university with the most school spirit by the Princeton Review, it’s no shock that ’Cuse kids love to represent their school, and clothing is a big part of that. This steady market of students eager to express their own Syracuse pride, is ultimately what got Levin in the apparel game to begin with. “I originally kind of wanted to do a tailgate account maybe, but I was like ‘Eh, I’m not really that good at it,’ and there were so many accounts like that,” she says. Around the same time that Levin decided to forgo her tailgate dreams, she started shopping second-hand for her own clothes at local Syracuse thrift shops, and inspiration struck.
“I realized that I wear a lot of Syracuse clothes, so I would look for that, and then I would find really cool and vintage pieces, and all of my friends would be like, ‘Oh my God, find me stuff,’” she says. It was at this point that Levin started to post a few of her finds on a separate Instagram, which currently has over 2,700 followers. “Honestly, I didn’t know it was going to become what it was,” she admits, explaining that it was difficult at first to launch a large clothing brand with so few resources.
Photos Courtesy of Vintage Cuse
“I never had any investors or anything obviously, because [Vintage Cuse was] so small, so I just started with my own money,” Levin says. From here, she applied some of what she’d learned in her accounting classes to keep track of her finances and stay organized as the brand began to take off. Fortunately, any money Levin initially invested into her company paid off right away. In fact, pieces were selling so fast, that Levin had to come up with an alternative way of pricing her products. “I used to just do a set price, and then [clothes] would sell out in the first five minutes,” she says. “[Now] I do auctioning, so I’ll set a starting price, people will DM me how much they want to bid, and I just keep updating it,” she continues, with an average bidding period of about eight hours per item.
Unlike some other student-run brands, however, the first people to buy from Vintage Cuse weren’t people in Levin’s own circle. The majority of them were actually eager new students and people Levin had never met herself. Once Levin realized who her audience really was, she decided to implement some marketing strategies to expand her following even further. “I did a few brand deals with Margot Lee, the YouTuber here, so obviously she has a huge platform,” Levin says. “We kind of have the same audience, so I reached out to her, and I gave her products in exchange for her posting them, so I gained a lot of followers that way.”
With the Vintage Cuse audience growing at such a rapid rate, Levin knew she wouldn’t be able to do everything on her own for much longer. Thinking ahead, she hired two other people to work for her to ensure that Vintage Cuse could keep up with the increasing demand. But with her own brand doing so well on SU’s campus, Levin began to think about taking her concept even further.
Enter VintageU— an online thrift store that provides vintage apparel for a whole series of different universities, not just Syracuse. At the beginning, Levin started out with five different schools, posting about five vintage pieces for each one. But although she had high hopes for this larger platform, Levin was slightly let down by the initial response. “I put those [clothes] out, some things sold, some things didn’t, and it was almost discouraging,” Levin says, causing her to keep focusing on Vintage Cuse.
Photos Courtesy of Vintage Cuse
As with most small businesses though, COVID-19 was a total game changer. “Once the pandemic hit, I started to really try to focus on VintageU,” Levin says. She added more and more schools, including Penn State, Wake Forest, and the University of Arizona, and found that she had more time at home to build up the platform with high-quality pictures and products.
“It was the same thing for Vintage Cuse,” Levin says. “I definitely was putting [clothes] out a lot more and posting more frequently.” The absence of in-person university bookstores also helped Levin during this chaotic time, since students had to shop online for their apparel anyway. “I would say I actually experienced more success over quarantine,” she says, echoing several other student-run brands, and emphasizing the value of time.
In just over two years, Levin has managed to launch two hugely successful clothing platforms, and the uncertainty of the pandemic has only continued to motivate her. Now, her concept behind Vintage Cuse and VintageU is showing universities across the country that you can communicate your school spirit sustainably, and with one-of-a-kind pieces you won’t be able to find anywhere else. In fact, Levin believes this is a huge reason behind all of her brands’ achievements. “I feel like what I'm doing is kind of unique, so that’s why I’ve been so successful,” she says, and there’s a lot of truth to that. At the end of the day, Levin is living proof that with a stand-out idea and the business savvy to stay on track, student-run brands can be incredibly successful even in these apocalyptic times. So what’s stopping you?