Closing My Antique Booth — and What Came After

After almost four years, I decided to close my antique booth—even though I wasn’t sure what would come next.

It was a hard decision, but also a relief. My sales had dipped over the last year and a half, and my interest had started to fade around the same time. I was tired and burned out, and even more tired of wrestling with the idea.

But before I could let go of the antique booth, I had to get to the root of why closing the booth was so difficult for me. I finally admitted to myself that going antiquing had become a big part of my weekly routine, and I didn’t want it to end.

I loved the hunt, not so much the cleaning and pricing—and I loved creating seasonal vignettes and planning around that type of curation.

Deep down, I knew it was time to pack up shop. I had done everything I could in those last months to turn things around. At the end of the day, I wasn’t making rent most months, and when I did pull a profit, it barely accounted for my time.

What closing the booth did—and what I couldn’t see at the time—was nudge me to start selling online. I had sold digital art on Etsy, but I had never shipped anything. It was new and a little uncomfortable at first, but I decided to give it a try and opened my Etsy shop, Dawn Vintage, in September—just three weeks later.

My first sale was a brass rocking horse during the first week of October. I remember hearing the cha-ching in the middle of the night and thinking—this might work.

And it has.

Something I was so set against turned out to be exactly what I needed. With that confidence, the next step is a studio shop—still in progress, but slowly beginning to take shape.