Walking into Dandelion Vintage and Used, the eye cannot help but wander every which way. There is so much to look at and so many details that go amiss at first glance.

The store is filled with beautiful, eccentric and colorful clothing hung in racks or showcased on the walls. There are cases displaying one of a kind jewelry, and bookshelves decorated with shoes and accessories of every kind.

The owner, Sarah Hudson, is the charming fashionista behind the counter. She beamed discussing her store Dandelion and how she was inspired to open a resale shop back in 1993.

After graduating from the University with a degree in advertising and marketing, she moved to San Francisco where she found herself inspired by the trend of reselling fashion at the time.

“I was working in non-profit advertising,” Hudson said, “and in my spare time — every second of my spare time — I would go to Haight Street. And Haight Street, at the time, was a very eclectic variety of vintage clothing stores, and the recycling movement of buy, sell and trade was just starting to happen.”

She expressed that back then, she didn’t possess the confidence to open a resale store in San Francisco, so Hudson traveled back home to Illinois to open her very own store.

Resale shops take in used and vintage clothing and resell them to people who look for items that tell a story or have a history of them. The store also sells new items, so Dandelion’s inventory is a well-balanced mix of new and old that is both eye-catching and inviting.

“I was very inspired by how the Californian style out there; it was really refreshing to me. So I decided to move back here,” she said. “My family and friends were all back here, so I moved back and opened a store in a town that I knew.”

Hudson opened her first store on First and Chester Street, but quickly outgrew it and moved to Taylor Street, where she stayed for approximately 20 years. She became friends with neighboring business owner Jeff Brandt, who is the owner of Exile, a record store on Main Street.

Both business owners soon found themselves lacking space for their merchandise and decided to merge stores three years ago and acquire a bigger space. It was particularly convenient when they discovered their leases were ending around the same time.

“We thought if we combined efforts, it might bring more variety for our customers,” Hudson said.

Brandt, who has worked in record stores since he was a teenager, just recently celebrated Exile’s 13th anniversary in November.

He described his positive relationship with Hudson, explaining how he is always amazed by the items Hudson acquires through traveling or the items that are donated to her store.

“(There’s) really cool vintage stuff that you’re not going to find anywhere else in town. The stuff that she gets is really unique,” Brandt said. “Sometimes I’m really surprised by the stuff that people bring in, that, you know, you wouldn’t expect they held on for decades and decades that end up in a shop like this.”

When asked what merchandise he himself has bought from Dandelion, Brandt described a unique 90-year-old medical textbook he bought as a gift. He said he wouldn’t have been able to find anywhere else.

Brandt collects unique and rare items for his record store as well, and he stated how recently, he had acquired the “Beatles Butcher Cover,” which is a banned Beatles “Yesterday and Today” LP which was recalled as soon as it was released, due to the cover being deemed too risque.

Dandelion’s inventory is always changing, and the store is never short of one of a kind items. This is why Dandelion is so appealing to regular customers as well as new ones.  

Susan Kerr, a resale shop owner from Robinson, Illinois, revisited Dandelion with her son Vinnie Kerr, in hopes of finding something eclectic and interesting.

“He wanted to look at albums, and I wanted to look at the vintage clothing,” she said.

Dandelion is a befitting name for the resale store, and Hudson couldn’t help laughing as she recounted the story behind the name.

“When I was a little girl, I used to bring bouquets of dandelions to my mom when I was too young to know that a lot of people considered them weeds,” Hudson said. “My mom would say, ‘Oh what lovely flowers!’ and it was only later that I realized that one person’s flower is another person’s weed.”

Hudson used this memory to connect her appreciation for things and put it into her store.

Hudson describes, “Somebody didn’t want this item of clothing, and so to them its a weed, but the next person might go, ‘oh this is a beautiful flower.’” 

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