You might not think matcha and vintage clothes go together. At Offline Tulsa Collective, you can find both.
Two vintage retailers and the owner of a local matcha business came together to launch the Offline Tulsa Night Market to create a space for small businesses to sell — and for the community to gather at the west Tulsa venue WOMPA.
Now they’re opening a new vintage store featuring a matcha bar in the Pearl District.
Offline Tulsa Collective, 1321 E. 6th St., will host a soft opening from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, with plans for a grand opening celebration in the coming weeks. There will be another soft opening Aug. 8.
“The whole experience is so fun in and of itself,” said Anna Draper, owner of Velvet Mushroom and one of three partners. “You also get to try it on, feel it and so it’s something that we’re trying to bring back.”
Abdi “Eli” Lopez of Okie VNTG, Hannah Duran of Tala Matcha and Draper only met six months ago and quickly became business partners.
Offline encourages people to come together, be off their phones and in a physical space. In today’s world, you don’t even have to leave your house to buy anything, Draper said.
“That’s like a dying art almost,” Draper said.
Lopez and Draper had their own physical stores until recently. Duran would primarily host pop-up shops in other spaces, including at Okie VNTG’s former store in east Tulsa.
The trio first talked about the idea to collaborate in December. It wasn’t long until they started touring spaces for the market and, later, for a shop.
When the Collective’s brick-and-mortar opens, it will feature the partners as permanent vendors in the space with plans to rotate other vendors in and out.
In March, Offline Tulsa Collective launched its night markets at WOMPA, 3306 Charles Page Blvd., which proved to be a hit. Cars lined the road for blocks and hundreds of people flowed into two large spaces packed with a wide variety of vintage clothing and accessories, plus some art from more than 50 vendors.
In fact, the amount of traffic caused organizers to encourage carpooling to the Aug. 15 night market.
Francella Aguilar and Fabi Corleto could be found in a corner of the Offline Tulsa Market in mid-July. Their racks were loaded with clothes they found, collected and prepared for prospective buyers.
The market gave them the space they needed to bring curated vintage clothes to other Tulsans for the first time with their small business, Central Collective.
“This is the beginning for us,” Aguilar, a native of Nicaragua, said in Spanish. “This is literally all we have.”
Corleto previously owned a store in her home country of El Salvador, and the two of them have also sold clothes online on Depop. The pair moved to Tulsa separately over the last four years.
The business name is a combination of inspirations: of Oklahoma being in the middle of the country, of their roots in Central America and of the collective community they hope to build here.
Aguilar and Corleto didn’t know a retail store would be in their future when they became friends. Four months ago, they realized how much they both loved to shop and dig for vintage clothes.
In May, the two went to the second Offline Tulsa Market, which sparked the idea of launching their small business. The two launched the business June 12.
“There’s clothes that still have tags on them, it’s clothes we don’t use anymore or secondhand clothing that we find and that are nice, and we said, ‘Oh my God, these deserve a second life,’” Aguilar said.
That’s a thread that unites the vintage vendors involved with the collective. Everybody loves finding their favorite piece of clothing, said Lopez, the Okie VNTG owner. Providing that experience to people is what they’re all about.
“If they shop, that’s great,” Duran added. “Because naturally when that happens, people are going to shop and everybody wins, but I think getting that into people and the community’s mind is like, we’re here because we want this to be a space for the community.”
This article was produced as part of a partnership between the Tulsa Flyer and La Semana, a Tulsa-based bilingual Spanish-English newspaper serving Latino communities in Oklahoma.
News decisions at the Tulsa Flyer are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
