September Visiting Vintage: Peppered Goods

We are welcoming Peppered Goods to Moon+Arrow to supply us with some incredible curated vintage pieces for the month of September. This month-long pop-up is in store only! Join us for a very special Fourth Friday, September 24th, to meet Caitlin and browse her gorgeous vintage pieces in the shop. 

Q: What is the significance behind your company’s name? How did Peppered Goods come to be?

When my partner and I started selling vintage online together 7 years ago, we went by a different name, MicknMarianne— a homage to the notoriously stylish couple, Mick Jagger + Marianne Faithful, because, well… have ya met us? haha.. but as love stories go, we had a baby, Pepper Lou, and felt that huge change needed to be carried into all aspects of our lives. In 2019 we changed our name to Peppered Goods— this also allowed us to sell more than just vintage! Peppering in all kinds of goods, now. 

Q: Why did you start collecting and selling vintage?

I’m not sure there is an answer to why I started collecting vintage, I tried to think about when it all started for me and I suppose it was already apart of my upbringing, middle child of a big family, lots of handmedowns and second hand clothing. I’ve loved ‘fashion’ since I was a toddler, changing out of my clothes into my older sisters tshirts to wear as dresses (I still love an oversized tee), driving my mother bonkers in elementary school with my choice of accessories… I think I was just born with an affinity for clothing.

When I had my first child, 13 quick years ago, I really loved dressing him in things that were nostalgic for me, which led to me starting my first Etsy store. I just sold kids pieces at first. Social media really played a part in why I started selling adult pieces around that time, I had people reach out to me worldwide and ask me to curate collections for their shops, that eventually led to me having my own shop. While I enjoyed being a buyer for brick and mortar shops the past 9 years, turning the focus inward this past year and a half has been a lot more rewarding. 

Q: What is your favorite part about being an artist in the Philadelphia area? 

To be honest, I’m just honored and flattered you consider me an artist! I never really thought of myself that way. I will say though that Philadelphia’s fashion & arts people are some of my favorite in the country. We all (seemingly) know each other or have already worked together on something, somewhere, and to be apart of a group that shows up for each other time and time again, is really cool. Philadelphia is home to a lot of really genuinely cool and artistic people, I’m just a suburb chick trying to blend in. 

Q: This one is just for fun. Who is your favorite musician or type of music? What is your inspiration when looking for vintage?

Hands down, no second thoughts about it, Jenny Lewis. I’ve loved her since I saw her in Troop Beverly Hills, her character and style was everything to me as a kid, I just got lucky that she kept at being awesome and influenced my life for the greater good, both with her music and impeccable style. I got extra lucky and ran into her once a hundred years ago on South Street before a Rilo Kiley show, she was trying boots on at that little boutique that used to sell Rocket Dog and stuff, damnit, I can’t remember the name, she looked up, we caught eyes and she said “These boots are rad, huh?” Obviously I didn’t murmur a word, the only star struck moment I would have in my life of touring with bands, haha. (Oh, the lives I’ve lived!) 

When hunting for vintage my rule has always been the same— will I wear it or can I style it? If the answer is no, I don’t pick it up. I know there are sellers who sell any & everything, as long as it’s vintage, but that doesn’t work for me. It doesn’t work for my clientele either. As hard as it’s been for my self depreciating ego to accept, people shop from us because they like my style, what I wear, how I dress, which is directly reflected in the items we choose to sell. When I branch outside of my own inspiration, those items don’t sell. It’s been a bit of a learning process, but if you’re not learning from yourself daily, what’s the point of anything?

Q: What does the future hold for Peppered Goods? Anything fun or exciting on the horizon?

Yes! Some of our customers will be happy to hear we are launching a website in early fall! It’s exciting and really overwhelming at the same time, we realized how much stock we actually have in this process, but I am excited to get our pieces out to the people. We will still do drops on our Instagram, but we have reserved the really rad stuff for the website (think rare tees, denim staples, one of a kind, unique). We hope to add small batch collaborative items as well, like the hand dyed cloud socks we do with Tinted Saga out of Charleston. Changing our name was intentional in this sense, we want to cultivate a community of sellers in our little corner of the world, if we can!

Recently, we have put a lot of our focus on the website, and our pop up with you is the first we have really done since Covid started, so we hope as life moves forward we are able to plan to do more shows and pop ups, here within our community and elsewhere. I’m sure many people can agree with us in this time, it’s hard to plan for things when everything is up in the air, but we are open to whatever opportunities come our way.