Matawan teens started selling vintage clothes, and now have their own Red Bank store

Susan Bloom

June 5, 2024 at 6:18 PM·8 min read

RED BANK - Growing up in Matawan, best friends Hailey Grillo and Hallie Endresen both loved vintage fashion.

They also shared an entrepreneurial streak — a trait which, in 2017, led the then-teenagers to launch Shedhead Vintage, a provider of handpicked vintage clothing from the 1960s to the 2000s, which they expanded from an online format to a Red Bank-based brick-and-mortar shop in 2021.

“I grew up going to thrift shops because it was a fun way to play around with your style,” recalled Grillo, 24, an Asbury Park resident whose teenage fashion tastes included 1990s grunge looks, band tees, grandpa sweaters and combat boots.

For Endresen, 23, a Matawan resident, “I started thrifting in high school but was always into the aesthetics of old movies and the rock music my parents listened to from the 1980s and 1990s. As a tween, I got really into fashion and started experimenting with my style,” she said. “I’ve gone through different phases and love all of the decades that we sell.”

Though the two had known of each other throughout their school years, they bonded during their junior year gym class at Matawan Aberdeen Regional High School.

Hallie Endresen and Hailey Grillo, owners of Shedhead Vintage, a Red Bank-based provider of cool vintage clothing since 2017.

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'Decided to do it together'

“We became friends in 2017 and started our business as soon as our friendship started,” Grillo said. “I’d had a fascination with owning a business since I was a kid and had tried a few times over the years — including starting a jewelry shop online with another friend — but the circumstances were never quite right. But once Hallie and I met, we both had a similar idea and decided to do it together.”

“In June 2017, we began taking photos of each other in clothing we thrifted and posting them on social media,” Endresen said. “We started selling and promoting items on Instagram but used the Depop platform to sell things and we still use that app daily.”

Scoring their finds in local retail and church thrift stores — Goodwill in Matawan was one of their favorites — they soon started traveling to stores throughout the tristate area to widen their net.

“When we first started, we were both still living with our parents and were using the shed in my parents’ backyard as our ‘warehouse’ to organize and store all of the clothes we were accumulating,” Grillo said of the genesis of their store’s name, Shedhead Vintage.

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The duo began selling their items to coffee shops, boutiques and specialty stores like Keyport Funhouse, which was owned by Grillo’s cousin Melissa O’Connell.

“We were trying to figure out our market, and selling to these stores was a good experience because it helped us better understand how to tag our clothes and track our inventory,” Endresen said.

“But in 2019, when we became a vendor to the New Brunswick-based store Chamber 43, which was a coffee shop, record shop and small music venue, we finally hit our stride and saw that people were coming in for our brand and style,” she said. “Our sales there helped build our bank account to where we needed to be in order to open our own store.”

That moment happened for Grillo and Endresen in May 2021, when they opened a 400-square-foot shop off Main Street in Avon, eventually relocating the following year to a larger shop in Red Bank that had formerly been an art gallery, a hair salon and a designer bag store.

“A lot of businesses had come and gone in there and the shop needed a little fixing up,” Grillo said, “but it had the space, big windows and big back room we needed, and Shedhead Vintage has been there ever since.”

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Shedhead Vintage, a Red Bank-based provider of cool vintage clothing since 2017.

'Fun, colorful and funky'

In their 1,200-square-foot shop, which features eclectic vintage art, movie posters and retro graphics on the walls, “we offer both men’s and women’s vintage clothing as well as belts, bags and jewelry from the 1960s to the early 2000s,” Grillo said.

“We make an effort to be size inclusive and have something for every style in all decades,” she said of items that include long prairie dresses from the 1970s, bell-bottomed denim jumpsuits from the 2000s, cardigans from the 1960s, plaid skirts with chains from the 1990s, and denim and miniskirts from every decade.

“Fun, colorful and funky is what we like, and there’s something for every budget here,” Endresen said. “You can pick up one of our sale skirts for as little as $1 all the way up to a 1970s-era Gunne Sax dress for $200.”

Serving a customer base made up largely of women ages 15 to 35 who are buying for their personal use or to wear to a themed party, as well as bands looking for pieces, Grillo said that 1990s and early 2000s crop tops, mesh and other things girls can wear in the summer or go clubbing in at night are currently trendy.

“Color, grunge and punk styles are also in and dark colors like black and deep purple are popular again too,” she said. “We know what’s vintage and popular, but we take chances on pieces that other shops wouldn’t because we like all styles and can see someone in every piece.”

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Among the coolest items to pass through their shop? “We sold a black leather jacket that Carly Simon had worn performing and on a few of her album covers — which even still had a tube of her lip gloss in the pocket — for a few hundred bucks,” Grillo said. “Her stylist brought it to us and verified its authenticity.”

The duo said that they love hunting for the items that populate their store.

“In addition to sourcing items in thrift stores, we go into people’s homes and go through closets, basements, attics, garages, barns and estate sales,” Endresen said of the big and small shopping trips she and Grillo take. “We use the days that our store is closed, or else before or after store hours, to find pieces and we love ‘obtaining,’ because you never know what’s going to turn up.”

“There’s something special about finding something you love here because it’s one-of-a-kind,” confirmed Grillo, who also believes that their work is helping to support the environment.

“Brands like ours have made a big impact by sharing information about the ills of fast fashion, and social media has made it very trendy to reuse clothing,” she explained. “A driving force of our business model is sustainability and connecting people with cool items that might otherwise have been sent to landfills.”

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Fashion show at the Count Basie

While they noted that getting foot traffic to their street can be challenging, “once people come into our store, they’re wowed,” Endresen said. And though there are many players in the vintage clothing space, “we don’t see other vintage shops as competition because there’s only one of everything and people have different styles and sizes,” she said. “We love to collaborate with different shops, build a community and send people to other small and alternative businesses to find what they’re looking for if we don’t have it.”

Toward that end, “we’ll be hosting a fashion show at the Vogel at Count Basie Center on June 26 at 7 p.m. in collaboration with Pearl Street Consignment and Lambs & Wolves beauty salon in Red Bank,” Endresen said. “This year’s show, called ‘The Punk Edit,’ has a punk theme, will feature local bands and attendees can purchase the clothing that’s modeled after the show.”

Looking ahead, “we’d love to have a large flagship store in Monmouth County — perhaps a retail, coffee and music destination that the community can enjoy — and expand to other locations as well,” Endresen said.

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Grillo agreed, noting that there’s endless reward in finding the items they sell. “We see the potential in things that others don’t and it’s exciting when people find something here that they love so much,” she said.

Endresen concurred. “I love the opportunity to work with my best friend and to see how happy customers are when they’re making a purchase and find something they’d been seeking for so long,” Endresen said. “For all of those reasons, this is such a fun, unique business and it never feels like work.”