Grape Frog closing physical location in Aurora

After opening up their vintage boutique in Aurora three years ago, Grape Frog Resale and Vintage Boutique owners Loren Berthelsen and Saxon Copeland have announced they are closing their physical location on Sept. 7 and moving exclusively online.
While the business’s last regular business day was Aug. 22, the couple will be hosting a three-day blowout sale Sept. 5-7. 
“People are certainly sad that we’re going and we’re sad to be going,” Berthelsen said. “Obviously, we made a lot of really good friends here in the shop. We have a lot of great customers and we’ve really been made welcome in the community.”
When opening the business in May of 2021, the couple began by purchasing resale clothing from stores, garage sales and consignment shops to recondition and offer up for sale.
While support for the business has grown since then, the owners wanted to take Grape Frog in the direction that would help it grow.
“We went into year four and started looking at our financial success and it has been a success for us, just not as much as we wanted,” Berthelsen said. “Aurora is a little small of a market for this kind of store.”
Including customers within Hamilton County, Berthelsen said that their clientele stretches between Omaha and Denver.
“We realized that our true success seemed to be coming from online and vintage pop-up markets,” he explained. “We also simultaneously wanted to concentrate more on vintage clothes, so focusing more on vintage sort of narrows our focus even more and it makes it even harder to sell in the small market. Although we have a lot of people here who love vintage clothes, they’re going to have to buy them online.”
Along with selling popular trends, Berthelsen and Copeland pride themselves on providing size inclusive wear in both mens and womens.
The couple will remain in Aurora for the majority of the year sourcing, but they plan to buy a home in Palm Springs, Calif., where they will spend the rest of the year.
“Our plan is to spend half the year here and half the year there,” he explained. “Here is where we do all our sourcing, for our vintage clothing and we find really great stuff here. We’ll do our sourcing here and then we take it back to Los Angeles in that area down the west of California (in pop-up markets).”
Grape Frog sells its vintage clothing currently on Etsy, Depop, Poshmark and eBay. While they currently don’t sell on the Grape Frog’s website, Berthelsen said they considered relaunching the website to sell their clothes.
“One of the things we do is curate collections of clothing and we want to offer those as curated collections and a limited series online,” he said. “So for instance, we’ll gather maybe 20 or 30 items that all fit into a certain genre, like a niche, maybe it’s like boho or something like that, then we’ll put a collection together and put it online and offer it for sale for two weeks and then take it down.”
Despite no longer using their physical location for Grape Frog, they will be renting out that L Street space to other businesses in town, particularly for retail.
Having been provided funding from Aurora’s Downtown Revitalization Grant, Berthelsen said the building had been renovated to have new windows, including two display windows in front of the store suitable for showcasing wares.

Welcoming the community
Having grown up in Aurora, Berthelsen shared that he was initially shocked with how welcoming the community was to their business. 
“It’s been really warm and welcome,” he stated. “You have the mayor comes by, said hi, just things from coming a big city perspective are really unusual.”
The small-town encounters continued even when they were outside of their store. 
“Even before we opened, we drove through the drive-thru at Pinnacle to deposit some checks and a woman asked us, ‘Hey, when’s your shop opening?’” Berthelsen recalled. “(We were like) ‘How did she know we have a shop?’”
Along with wanting to bring their business to Aurora, Berthelsen and Copeland hoped to bring a place for all in the community to be welcomed, no matter their identity.
“We’re a gay couple,” Berthelsen said. “We’re husband and husband, so one of the things we really want to do is create a safe space for people in the town to be able to come and maybe they know someone’s who’s gay, or they are gay, or they’re non-binary, it doesn’t matter. On the window, it says ‘This is a safe space’ and for us that has been one of the most important things, because people come in and they feel really safe here.”
Beyond the walls of their shop, Berthelsen and Copeland worked with retailers around the square to promote their businesses as well as events that brought those within and outside of the community together.
“We got together with some of the other retailers and we founded a group called Retail Renegades,” Berthelsen said. “It’s our downtown retailers group and we do a lot of things. We do Come Home to Christmas, we do sidewalk sales and one of the bigs we did was Small Town Market Days.”
Throughout the years, they hosted clothing swaps were they exchanged clothing with the community.
“We do that a couple times a year and we do it in the backyard. We just put out lots of clothing and people bring clothing. You can take clothes, you can leave clothes, do whatever you want to do, and then anything that’s left there’s no cost. It’s just some comfortable clothes you want and anything that are left over, we then donate to a charity.”
While they plan to appear at local vintage markets, such as the Totally Rad Vintage Fest in Lincoln on Sept. 15, they hope to return to return to Aurora when the town has its own pop-up markets.
“We’ve had invitations from a couple of retailers to do a pop-up at their location during A’ROR’N Days,” Berthelsen said. “Last year, we did a big rack full of tie-dye and we did really well with this. We can make them do a tie-dye or a boho. We will figure that out. We have a lot of vintage markets scheduled moving forward.”
More information can be found on Grape Frog’s website at grape-frog.com, or through the Grape Frog Facebook page or its Instagram at Grape Frog Vintage.