About The Breezy Store

If you've made it this far, thanks for being here. Seriously, I really appreciate you checking out my page. My name is Zach, although most people have called me Breeze since middle school. That's also around the same time I stumbled into the world of sneakers, clothing, and eventually what became The Breezy Store.

It really started when I was playing football in sixth grade. One of my coaches happened to be a pretty serious sneaker collector, and he was moving and trying to sell some of his collection. At the time I had a few hundred bucks saved up from mowing lawns, doing chores, and whatever else a kid that age does to scrape together some money. I bought a few pairs from him, including 2012 Bred 11s, GMP 6s, and Kilroy 9s. The Bred 11s especially were basically the pinnacle of sneakers to me at that time.

Eventually I sold them for more than I paid, and I remember thinking, wait... this is pretty cool.

Apparently you could buy sneakers, enjoy them for a little while, sell them to somebody else, make some money, and then go buy more sneakers. That seemed like a pretty good system to me.

Keep in mind, most of this was done locally. I couldn't even drive yet, so my mom would soon become the first and only employee of The Breezy Store long before The Breezy Store actually existed. She was my shoe deal chauffeur.

I remember one deal where she drove me to meet someone locally and I bought an original pair of 1985 Air Jordan Chicago 1s and an original pair of 1985 Bred 1s for around $400. My mom understandably thought I had lost my mind. Her middle-school-aged son was handing some guy several hundred dollars for two pairs of old, beat-up sneakers.

But then I sold them for more than I paid.

So she started to get it.

I thought those 1's were pretty cool. Unique in a way that a modern retro pair couldn't capture. At one point I even got interested in restoring old sneakers. I remember doing a midsole swap on a pair of original 1994 Black Cement 3s, and they actually turned out pretty good. Eventually I realized there were people out there who were a whole lot better at restoring sneakers than I was, so I was happy to leave that part to them. But learning how these old shoes were constructed (way better than modern pairs), taking them apart, trying to bring them back to life—all of that just made me appreciate them even more.

As a side note, my grandma is an avid antique collector, so even since I was young I had an appreciation for old things. When I started to get into vintage sneakers, I wanted the cool vintage clothes to go with them.
Vintage Polo, Tommy, and Nautica is what I considered to be the trifecta. Still kind of do. Polo Hi-Tech, Tommy Team Lotus, Nautica Competition. Think Raekwon in the 90's rocking Snow Beach. The Mary J Blige song "What's the 411?", in Grand Puba's opening verse- "Girbauds hangin' baggy, Tommy Hilfiger top gear". That's what I wanted. By the time people were getting onto skinny jeans I was already done with them.

That's around the time I started thrifting.

Honestly, I think thrifting is where this whole thing really clicked for me. There was something way more exciting about walking into a thrift store, spending a couple bucks on something nobody else noticed, and finding out it was worth $100, as opposed to spending $300 on a pair of sneakers and selling them for $400. Obviously both made you $100, but for whatever reason the first one made way more sense in my brain.

The treasure hunt began.

There's something about finding an old piece of clothing or an old pair of sneakers that somebody else might completely overlook. I like knowing a little bit about a lot of things, because every once in a while that random knowledge means you recognize something special that everyone else walked right past.

That's still probably my favorite part of all of this. The hunt.

By the time I was in high school, I had accumulated enough stuff that a section of my parents' basement basically became a clothing store. I had racks set up with everything I'd thrifted and collected, and my friends could come over and dig through it all.

Calling it a "store" might actually be giving the setup a little too much credit.

The lighting consisted of pretty much a single pull-string light bulb. Oh, and later on I hung Christmas lights from the ceiling, so that was quite the upgrade. It was so dim that if somebody actually wanted to inspect something on one of the racks, they'd have to take it off the hanger, walk across the basement, and hold it up underneath the light just to see what they were looking at.

But people actually came down there and bought stuff.

I still remember selling my friend David a vintage Polo Bear ski shirt. I gave him a good deal on it, and then the next day I saw him wearing it at school. He was stoked because everybody thought the shirt was sick, and were apparently trying to buy it right off his back for more than he'd paid me.

I could've thought, damn, maybe I should've charged him more.

But honestly, I was just stoked that he was stoked.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, my friend Dom came through one day and started calling the whole operation...

The Breezy Store.

The name always just stuck in my brain.

The operation has gotten slightly more sophisticated since then, but the basic idea really hasn't changed much.

The selling part is important because it allows me to keep doing it, but I've never really gotten the most enjoyment out of making a couple bucks. That's more of a necessary part of keeping the thing alive. What I actually enjoy is seeing my work be put on full display in someone enjoying wearing something I procured.

I've always looked at clothes and sneakers as a form of wearable art.

Getting dressed is one of those things everyone has to do every morning anyway, so you might as well have some fun with it. I like having enough weird stuff in my closet that I can wake up and decide who I feel like being that day. If I want to dress like I walked out of a '90s grunge show, I can. If I want to dress like Michael Jordan showing up to a playoff game in his prime, I can. If I want to go back to my 2013 Hypebeast roots, most of that stuff is gone by now but I can still do that too. Or I can mix all of it together and come up with something completely different.

It's not about vanity or trying to impress anyone. Half the time nobody else even knows what I'm wearing anyway.

When I was younger I walked into a Foot Locker wearing an original pair of 1995 Concord 11s (fly as hell). One of the employees looked at them and told me they were fake. He'd probably just never seen an original pair before. I tried explaining that to him, he still didn't believe me, and that was pretty much that.

But that's also kind of what I love about this stuff.

Nobody needs to know.

I know what they are. I know why they're cool, and that's enough.

One of my favorite things I own is a crumbling pair of original 1986 Jordan 2s. If you showed them to the average person, they'd probably wonder why I haven't thrown them in the garbage. To me, they're one of the coolest things I own. It is the epitome of the ultimate sleeper diamond in the rough. AKA- just my style (even though I can't even wear them).

Eventually, when I was finishing high school and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, fashion was really the only thing I could point to that I'd already been genuinely interested in for years. Kent State University was right down the road and had a Fashion Merchandising program, so that's where I ended up.

I'll be the first to admit I wasn't the greatest student in the world. I didn't graduate with some unbelievable GPA or anything like that. But I made it through, earned my degree, and I'm proud of that. More importantly, I got to study something I'd already spent a huge portion of my life learning about on my own.

Somewhere through all of this, The Breezy Store became the place I wanted to put everything together.

Earlier this year, I actually got the website to a point where I thought I was basically finished with it. Then I stepped away for a while. I didn't lose interest in the project, I just wasn't really sure what the vision was anymore or what exactly I was trying to turn it into.

Looking at it again after letting it sit for a while, I think maybe it just needed some time to marinate.

Because now I realize I don't really need The Breezy Store to become anything.

I'm not trying to build some massive resale empire. I'm definitely not expecting to make a million dollars doing this. I just want this website to exist as my own little corner of the internet. A place where I can sell some of the things I find, archive the things I've already sold, write blog posts about whatever I happen to think is cool, and generally have an outlet for something I've been doing for more than half my life.

If I can sell enough stuff to fund the next trip to the thrift store without taking money out of my regular work bank account, that's honestly a win in my book.

Going back through everything while rebuilding the website has actually been one of the coolest parts. I'm working on the sold listings now, digging through years of old photos, and I'm finding things that I have absolutely zero recollection of ever owning.

But at some point, I found that thing somewhere. I thought it was cool. I brought it home. And then eventually someone else somewhere in the world saw it and thought it was cool enough to spend their hard-earned money on it.

Now it's part of their closet.

I think that's pretty awesome.

Every old shirt, jacket, pair of jeans, or pair of sneakers had some kind of life before it got to me. Most of the time I'll never know what that life was. Then I own it for a while, and eventually it might go somewhere else.

Maybe somebody buys a piece from me and keeps it forever. Maybe they sell it again. Maybe twenty years from now somebody finds it sitting in another thrift store and the whole thing starts over.

Who knows.

The Breezy Store is just my little part of that cycle.

It's technically a store, sure. But it's also my collection, my archive, my creative outlet, and my excuse to keep digging through piles of clothes looking for that one thing that makes me stop and think, wait... what the hell is this?

Because after all these years, that's still the best part.

Some things I'll keep. Some I'll sell. Some will go to my brothers or my friends. Some will probably end up halfway across the world with someone I'll never meet.

And then I'll go looking for more.

Thanks for being here.
 

As a final note, I'd like to dedicate this page to my brothers, Nate and Jake, my parents, who have supported me and my passions from the very beginning, and my late friend Eric, a fellow collector and a big part of what made this hobby so much fun for me growing up.

Thank you for being part of the story.