SOUTH ROYALTON – Like Elle Woods in the 2000s comedy “Legally Blonde,” Mya Johanson is a law student obsessed with clothes.
“I love wearing clothes, I love getting new clothes, and then I love getting more clothes,” Johanson, 24, said in a recent phone interview.
High-end boutiques might have suited Woods, but Johanson, a second-year student at Vermont Law and Graduate School, is more at home rifling through the jam-packed racks of a thrift store.
Thrifting is how Johanson bonds with her older sister. It allows her to shop sustainably while indulging in her love of fashion.
In recent years, it’s also been a way to make money. After her closet hit a bursting point, Johanson began selling some of her clothes on the thrifting apps Depop and Poshmark.
In the back of her mind, she fantasized about running her own store, how she might stock and decorate it.
That vision came to fruition over the weekend when Johanson opened Royalton Reclaimed in a Chelsea Street storefront previously occupied by the Thrifty Fox, a secondhand store that closed last year.
“I saw that there was a need for it,” said Johanson, who grew up on her family’s sheep farm in Illinois.
Her classmates at VLGS, which specializes in environmental law, share her interest in sustainability, and they also need somewhere to buy affordable clothes in town, she said.
Thrift stores are “so good for the environment,” said third-year law and master’s student Sisley Pryor in a Monday interview outside Royalton Reclaimed.
They’re also “a place of joy.”
“It’s a way that I can hang out with my friends, have fun, giggle,” said Pryor, standing next to fellow third-year Rubina Manjikian.
Pryor and Manjikian are regular customers at LISTEN Thrift Store and Donation Center in Lebanon and at Uplifting Thrifting in White River Junction, but they’ve missed having a thrift store within walking distance from the law school.
“It means everything to me” that there’s a new store in town, Manjikian said.
Johanson runs Reclaimed around her class schedule, and she hadn’t yet arrived when Manjikian and Pryor stopped by around noon on Monday.
Twenty minutes later, Johanson opened with enough time to mind the store for a couple of hours before her next class.
Stepping inside Royalton Reclaimed is like taking a time machine back to a thrift shop in the early 2000s. Green string curtains dangle from the windows, and a shaggy rainbow-colored rug lies beneath a cheetah print couch.
“Clothes deserve a second chance, not your ex,” reads a print on the wall.
Near the bathroom, there’s a shelf lined with $8 records and $5 books, and racks and racks of sparkly tops, floral dresses, men and women’s blazers and other garments going for about $15 to $40.
“I love finding vintage blazers,” Johanson said. “Business wear is my favorite thing to thrift.”
True to the store’s ethos of sustainability, Johanson has sourced pretty much all the decor from Facebook Marketplace and other thrift stores.
Meanwhile, Reclaimed’s collection represents hours of rummaging through estate sales, secondhand shops and Johanson’s own closet.
“It was kind of like a treasure hunt, finding all the stuff I wanted to fill the space,” she said.
Johanson also has vendor racks for people to sell their own clothes. Each rack costs $30 per month to rent, and Johanson earns a 30% commission on sales.
Altogether, setting up the store cost a couple thousand dollars, which Johanson pulled from her savings.
”I don’t want it to be a super high-risk endeavor,” said Johanson, who pays $925 a month in rent to the same landlord who manages her apartment.
While law students like Pryor and Manjikian are thrilled to have a thrift store in town, that doesn’t mean running one is easy. The Thrifty Fox, for instance, closed after struggling to turn a profit.
It’s too early to tell whether Royalton Reclaimed will fare differently, but Johanson plans to use social media to reach a wider market.
She also intends to listen “to the community and (give) them what they need,” she said.
When Elle Woods turns up at Harvard Law School in “Legally Blonde,” her patronizing ex-boyfriend is shocked that she was accepted, to which she responds with confidence:
“What, like it’s hard?”
Johanson has a similar attitude toward balancing her studies and running the store.
“Honestly I would be sitting at a desk anyways…so I might as well be sitting in a store that I created, that I love being at,” she said.
