The Stories of our Collections

First off, how are you guys? What a crazy year it has been!?!? Unfortunately, for us Hull’s, this year was preceded by four really tough ones. So, we are trying to keep our heads and spirits up and innovate and pivot like so many others.

Smoot and I in our first antique booth in Marburger Farm Fall 2013.

One way of doing so is by kicking off a new web-shop series coming this Monday, called RVT Collections!

RVT Collections will share new merchandise that reflects the stories behind our journey of becoming antique dealers - including a peek into the places we’ve traveled around the world and people we’ve met while curating our collection of items to sell. You’ll read how our children are a part of this somewhat gypsy way of life, how Round Top has evolved over the last nine years and how we’ve been a part of it, and a few stories of some of the pieces themselves. Because, when it’s all said and done – it’s all about the STORIES and the MEMORIES of life.

And every piece of RVT Collections is meant to bring you to a time or place, to a story, that connects you to personal meaning.

Isn’t that more important than ever right now? Like I said, it’s been a tough year, and for us, we’ve seen all kinds of challenges as a business, family – we can all relate. But when I am surrounded by precious items with meaning that I love, and give me that extra reminder to remain positive, that is where I find inspiration

I hope the RVT Collections do the same for you!

Here’s how it all happened for us, and along the way, I am looking forward to sharing more details, answering questions and providing guidance from our experiences, and hopefully giving you inspiration.

We started our web-shop in January 2014 after our first national publication feature in Country Living Magazine. Smoot and I had our first vintage booth at Round Top’s prestigious Marburger Farm show in the fall of 2013 and were preparing to do our second one in the spring of 2014. We hired Haylei Smith to help us set up a Squarespace website and spent eight hours straight on New Year’s Eve from 6:00pm to 2:00 am loading our items. We had never rung in the new year creating a website, but why not?! We certainly toasted a new beginning! And writing resolutions was easy because we had big goals.

I’ll be honest - vintage web-shops take a lot to operate. You first have to invest your time and money to travel to the towns, states, or countries to source the items, and then carefully select merchandise that fits your business style at a cost that you can ultimately see a return from. Once you get the items home (another expense if you are shipping them back), you then inventory, clean and repair any items in need. I want to go into MUCH more detail on the how-to’s of all of this to help you along, and you can look forward to more blog posts that provide helpful hints.

My favorite part is styling and shooting the pieces (including images of any signs of wear and tear so shoppers are aware of their condition since they can’t touch them like they can at a flea market) to be able to load the images onto the website after weighing and measuring them. Then, it’s on to promoting and advertising your shop and wares. The final phase is packaging and shipping the pieces that sell.

Don’t get me wrong - I LOVE the process, but it’s not for the faint of heart. More to come, so much more to share, and I hope you’re excited to hear about it.

Fast forward to four years ago, our attention shifted to building the additional three cottages we added to our Round Top property, operating events, workshops + retreats, and unfortunately, dealing with the extreme intensity of three floods in a 16-month time span in our family home where we lived in Houston.

There were numerous other big events, but the worst was our son’s traumatic brain injury and subsequent two year-long recuperation journey when he was 14. The bright side in that four-year period was that our son did ultimately recover and we moved our family home to Austin in 2017, where we had wanted to live for as long as I can remember. *Fun fact – we have operated our Round Top business from afar since we started – living approx. an hour and a half away.

I share all of this to explain that the treasures we are preparing to sell are from buying trips as far back as my first one I took with Tim and Carol Bolton (of Carol Hicks Bolton Antiquities in Fredericksburg, Texas) to France in 2013. Since that first amazing trip where they mentored and taught us the ropes of how to buy antiques in Europe, we began to take family buying trips together to source furniture and accessories for our rental properties and to resell. Many of those treasures stayed boxed and in storage as life took its twist and turns. So, we are excited to begin unearthing and sharing them with you.

Each of our RVT Collections will be numbered with the background stories and images from our travels shared.

So, we invite you to set your clocks for this Monday 12/14 at 10:00 am to shop our first RVT Collection 01.

Make sure you are on our mailing list to receive a 15% discount on opening day! If not, click here to sign up!

Thanks from the bottom of our hearts for your encouragement, your business, and for being a part of our tribe.

xoxo,

Paige