How did Levi’s® Authorized Vintage get its start?
I’d heard about a vintage dealer in LA who claimed to have more than 50,000 units of Made in the USA 501® Jeans and Trucker Jackets that he’d been storing over his lifetime. He was looking to get out of the game, and as a nice, fitting end to the story, he wanted to sell the products back to Levi’s®. I went to LA a week later, to a really sketchy industrial area, and I met this guy called Jeff Fuller, who’s become a good friend of mine. He told me his whole life story, how he started selling vintage clothes as a hobby. He’d travel to Europe, and back in the day, he was able to pay for things with jeans. He was making more money out of that than he was his day job, and he fully transitioned into buying and selling vintage Levi’s® .
He showed me what he had in his warehouse, and it was indeed this really impressive collection of products. Nobody’s given me any information contrary to this, but it was probably the biggest hall of vintage Levi’s® that existed. I think it was 55,000 units in total.