Carmen MacDougall is not one to see a problem and wait around for someone else to fix it. She has a creative mind and if she wants something that is not available, she makes it. She’s a Chicago native and when she went to school in Manhattan she was disappointed in the thrift scene that she found. Clothes were not very good quality and priced unreasonably high just because the word “vintage” was attached to them. So she found a way to fix this and offer thrifted clothes at more reasonable prices by starting her own online vintage clothing store.

She hand picks and with the help of her partner, photographs each piece of clothing before uploading it to the cite to start the selling process. She gets her friends to model the clothing which gives the clothes life and increases their appeal. Buying from Bummer City also saves you the time and hassle of digging and sifting through racks upon racks of old clothes to actually find the nice pieces that are hiding.

The store ships anywhere in the United States, but their target audience is students and people in the New York area. A member of the Bummer City Apparel team can also meet with customers in the East Village or on campus to hand-deliver items, thus eliminating shipping costs.

Being the avid thrifter that I am, I could not believe my eyes when I first saw all of the clothes on the website under the “sold” section. She sells things for $10-$20 that I could find easily for under $5. I say this not as an insult but as a complement because she is not just posting clothes for much higher than she paid, she is selling them; and by the looks of the sold page, she is making a lot of money.

I love to thrift and turn things for a profit so this inspires me to believe that I can combine those two loves. I give Carmen credit for noticing a problem and coming up with a profitable way to satisfy that need.