How Vintage Reselling (and WordPress) Are Saving Me Again

For a long time, my vintage journey on the internet froze around 2021.

Which, in hindsight, tracks. 2021 was the year I was mentally done with everything and mostly just trying to survive the day.

Back then I was working for a construction company that treated the pandemic more like an inconvenience than a mass-casualty event. We were considered “essential,” even though my work was mostly solitary at the computer, I still had to be physically in the building while people across St. Louis were getting sick and dying.

At night I’d go home, open my laptop, and work on the St. Louis COVID Memorial project: tracking obituaries, honoring the dead, and quietly processing the grief that never seemed to show up in the headlines.

By morning, it was back to business as usual.

It was miserable. I’d taken that job after GreenLeaf Market because no one was hiring when the lockdown hit, and it seemed safer than staying in a grocery store without health insurance while regular customers were becoming some of the city’s first COVID deaths. It was a survival move, not a fit.

So as soon as there was even a whisper of vaccines and hope, my brain started looking for an exit—any exit.

And, like it has more than once in my life, vintage gave me one.

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Vintage as an Escape Hatch (Again)

That’s when I pulled my vintage bins out of storage and reopened VintageReveries.com.

I started listing again. I remembered how much I loved the process:
photographing, describing, researching tags and labels, connecting garments with people who would actually wear them. I made some solid sales, but the real value was in how quickly my dormant e-commerce skills woke up.

That small 2021 relaunch ended up being my audition tape for a much better-paying online retail job. I leaned on everything vintage had reminded me I knew:

• writing product descriptions that actually convert
• basic SEO and search behavior
• photographing and measuring in a way buyers trust
• organizing categories and collections so humans and Google can both find things

I landed an e-commerce role that paid about $15–20k more than the construction job. It felt like leaping a whole tax bracket.

That retailer job was genuinely good in many ways. It was like getting paid to go to grad school in online retail. I learned:

• how real-world email lists drive revenue
• how good UX quietly walks a shopper from “just browsing” to “checking out”
• how to build efficient workflows so the site can grow without chaos

The catch was that after a full day in e-commerce, the last thing I wanted to do at night was… more e-commerce. Add in a 45-minute rush-hour commute and a full return-to-office push, and my capacity for side projects evaporated.

Eventually I jumped to a fully remote nonprofit role, then into the “three-day job” that became the door out of that room. I’ve written about that whole chapter in “April Is the Pause That Builds the Beat,” so I won’t rehash it here—except to say this:

By the time I finally stopped, I was more burned out than I realized.

Which is why it feels so significant that, in this season between roles, I came back to vintage again. And this time, I decided to treat VintageReveries not just as a nostalgic side project, but as a proper small business and a living lab for everything I know about digital strategy.

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Looking at the Numbers (And Flinching a Little)

The shift started with something as unromantic as opening Google Analytics.

I pulled up my GA4 reports and felt my stomach dip a little:

• Site-wide bounce rate had crept up to around 75%, from about 28.7% in the earlier design.
• Engagement rate was sitting at 24.96%, down from 31.29%.
• The homepage in particular was underperforming, which is a polite way of saying: “Almost any thoughtful redesign is going to be an improvement.”

It wasn’t catastrophic. But it also wasn’t aligned with what I know how to do.

So I gave myself permission to go on a focused little binge.

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How I Rebuilt VintageReveries in One Focused Sprint

Because this is my personal site, I’m going to go into the nerdy details. This is the process I’d use for many small business clients too—just with more Loom videos and fewer swear words.

1. Clone the site to a staging domain

I wanted to see how any new theme would behave with my real content, not demo lorem ipsum.

I:

• used Jetpack’s site cloning feature to copy VintageReveries.com to a staging domain I reserve for experiments
• kept WooCommerce installed so product templates would stay intact
• put WooCommerce into test mode and hid the staging site from search engines
• disabled search plugins and payments so nothing weird could accidentally go live

Could I have done this with BackWPup, manual cPanel backups, or a one-off staging plugin? Absolutely. But I’ve paid for Jetpack for a decade, I’m on a grandfathered plan, and in this case it was the fastest, least-friction option.

2. Switch from Extra to Divi (with help from a child theme)

For years, the site ran on Elegant Themes’ Extra theme. Extra is fantastic when your site is blog-forward with a light shop. But it leans heavily on its Category Builder, which isn’t as flexible for modern, product-driven layouts.

On staging, I:

• installed Divi
• installed the Divi Girl child theme as my starting point because the color scheme was already close to VintageReveries
• imported one of the bundled home page layouts and customized it: hero, featured categories, a strip of new arrivals, a section for blog posts, and a small “about” area with a photo

Because I know WordPress and Divi pretty well, the actual redesign part went quickly. I’d estimate:

• 3-ish hours to get the homepage 90% of the way there
• minimal CSS since the child theme handled most of the styling
• very little structural overhaul for product pages; most of the change was the front door

3. Create new graphics with AI, but keep the soul

I’d had ChatGPT generate some mid-century line drawings of women in different silhouettes earlier this year. I used those as references and played with Google Gemini’s latest model (at the time) to generate fresh banner graphics in the same spirit:

• mid-century fashion illustration feel
• line-drawing style that reads well at different screen sizes
• flexible enough to reuse across blog imagery and social media

This part actually took almost as long as the layout—probably close to an hour—because art direction is still art direction, even when you’re using AI.

4. Sleep on it, then test mercilessly

Because I never trust a major website change I’ve only looked at for one night, I:

• left all my tabs open
• came back the next morning with fresh eyes
• tested on mobile and tablet (highly recommend doing this before you get attached)

One early catch: the home page background graphic that looked nice on desktop completely overwhelmed the text on mobile. I removed it for smaller breakpoints so the copy could breathe, and made a note to revisit the mobile background later.

After about 20–30 minutes of tweaks, it felt ready.

5. Move the design to the live site (without breaking everything)

Rather than overwriting the live site from staging (which would have clobbered some newer product data and plugin configurations), I:

• exported all the Divi layouts (home page, shop archives, any custom templates)
• exported theme options and Divi Builder settings
• exported the child theme itself
• imported those into my live site
• assigned templates to the correct pages and archives

The whole “move design to live” step took maybe half an hour, plus another 20–30 minutes of QA.

Result: a drastically updated front door, minimal disruption to my catalog, and a design that better reflects where I’m taking the brand.

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Solving the Social Media Automation Snarl

The next headache was automation.

I wanted Nuelink to pull product data from WooCommerce so I could schedule “new arrival” posts without manually uploading every single photo and link. For reasons that turned out to be edge-case WordPress weirdness, Nuelink and a few other tools weren’t reading my store feed correctly.

This is where AI moved from “fun toy” to “actual coworker.”

With Gemini’s help, I troubleshot:

• product feed URLs
• how WooCommerce was exposing (or not exposing) categories
• which endpoints Nuelink could consume reliably

The eventual workaround was simple once I saw it:
have Nuelink pull from product category feeds instead of insisting on one monolithic store feed.

Is it perfect? No. But:

• it gives me a steady “bread and butter” stream of auto-generated posts to Facebook and Instagram
• I can still go in and manually customize posts when I have the energy
• it keeps the brand visibly alive while I’m buried in measuring hems and steaming coats

And right now, that’s exactly what I need.

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Letting AI Carry the Cognitive Load (Without Losing My Voice)

Another thing I’m doing differently this time is respecting my cognitive bandwidth.

I have a lot of information in my head: WordPress, SEO, analytics, email strategy, fashion history, garment construction, photography, copywriting. When I’m fresh, that mix is a superpower. When I’m exhausted, it’s heavy.

So instead of forcing myself to recall every technical term at midnight, I:

• brain-dump condition notes and measurements
• have AI help draft first-pass product descriptions
• sanity-check fashion terms (capelet vs. bolero vs. shrug, etc.)
• use AI research assistants to structure historical deep-dives (like the St. Boniface / Ivory Theater post I just wrote)

The key for me is this: AI handles the scaffolding. I keep the stories, the context, and the gut sense of what a piece means.

That shift alone makes the whole process feel sustainable instead of draining.

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Vintage Selling as Ongoing Career Training

Zooming out, VintageReveries has become more than a side business. It’s my ongoing lab for:

• e-commerce UX and CRO
• content strategy and SEO
• automation and email flows
• AI-assisted workflows
• gentle, sustainable small-business pacing

Every job I’ve had in the last decade shows up here:

• The construction and retail chapters taught me what not to normalize in a workplace.
• The e-commerce retailer job gave me the foundations to run an online store like a real business.
• VentureLab sharpened my systems, automation, and AI thinking.
• My current freelance work stretches me further into marketing automation and cross-tool orchestration.

Vintage pulls all of that together in one room full of mannequins, ring lights, a measuring table, a 4070 humming in the corner, and boxes of carefully stored clothing that somehow stayed bug-free through years of transition.

It also connects back to the 21-year-old me who was drop-shipping public-domain CD-ROMs from A2ZCDs on eBay, building little checkout flows on GeoCities with PayPal buttons, and secretly dreaming about “online business” before I had language for any of it.

I didn’t have mentors then. I do now—some human, some silicon. And I have a lot more self-trust.

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What I’m Open To Next

Between now and the end of January, my main focus is:

• getting as much vintage listed as possible (on my own site and select marketplaces)
• continuing to refine VintageReveries.com as a best-in-class small vintage shop
• sharing the behind-the-scenes process more openly, for other small business owners and would-be resellers

At the same time, I’m honestly curious about what the “right” next role might look like.

If I go back into a formal role, I know I want:

• leadership that values data, constructive feedback, and actual process
• a team environment where asking questions is seen as curiosity, not incompetence
• room to bring the full stack of what I do: strategy, execution, systems, and emotional intelligence

Until then, I’m here, in my studio:

• steaming coats
• measuring hems
• tweaking landing pages
• letting AI handle the boring parts
• and remembering that vintage has now saved me more than once—from bad jobs, from burnout, and from forgetting what I’m actually capable of.

If you want to:

– shop: head over to VintageReveries.com
– talk WordPress, GA4, or small-business systems: reach out
– explore working together (consulting, contract, or something more formal): I’m open, especially after the new year, to conversations with people who value thoughtful, data-driven, human-centered work.

Vintage is my business. It’s also my teacher.

And right now, in this season between chapters, it’s the way I’m walking myself back home.

P.S. For the fellow data nerds: right now I have only about 107 active listings, but my rolling sell-through rate is a little over 3 percent and my average order value is just above 50 dollars. In a down economy, those are very encouraging signals. They tell me there is real demand here and that tightening up my systems and listings is worth the effort.

P.P.S. If you want to see where all of this happens, check out the studio photos below. It’s the same setup I shared on VintageReveries: mannequins, ring lights, a 4070 quietly pumping out videos for ReachingMyDreams.com, failed mushroom experiments, a lost monkey puzzle seedling, and racks of vintage waiting for their second life.