Luxury Restoration with Jesse Johnson and BY VIVE

August 23, 2023

Listen to my voiceover here.

I love to meet new people offering circular services, and this week I met Jesse Johnson, founder of BY VIVE, a luxury restoration business.

Beginnings

Jesse started out buying and selling vintage guitars in college, then watches, which took off, so he added jewelry, handbags and streetwear, all sold online. Soon after he opened a luxury resale store, STORE 5a, in Columbus, OH, then Nashville, TN - also recently Tulsa, OK. (I need to do a whole separate post on what’s in the water in Ohio that is creating all these amazing circular practitioners!)

Early on Jesse had goldsmiths and artisans on staff so that he could buy things that weren’t in great condition and restore them to like-new condition (there’s definitely a good margin for this work on luxury items). Clients started coming in to have things fixed, not to resell them. It helped that Jesse had established a nice store and a pretty website, i.e. he had build trust with the community that his staff could execute high quality repairs for expensive items.

Trust

This theme of trust comes up frequently in the repair conversations I’ve had over the past months. There are no shortage of repair and alterations vendors around the country, but our relationship with them is….fractured? People don’t have the same regular need or frequent visits that they might have in the past. I think cheap clothing has really kept people from feeling like they should invest in their clothes by making them fit better or fixing them when they’re broken. I myself am very guilty of this. When I finally find ‘my person’ I trust to help me fix my broken clothes, believe me, I’ll tell you!

Restoration Opportunity

So, Jesse saw an opportunity in the repair space. There is a lot of circular innovation in technology, intake, sorting, logistics, but still not a lot of focus on actually restoring items, which Jesse argues is the backbone of circularity. (I tend to agree. I believe we have lost focus on what happens to a product between its first sale and the end of it’s useful life- but that is where the opportunity lies.) He got an MBA in Spain where he met his COO and they started BY VIVE about 18 months ago to offer restoration to brands, retailers, and resale companies. They also continue to offer items for resale themselves.

Jesse is seeing the opportunity grow within luxury as brands want to become more sustainable. Restoration and repair is an obvious way to do that, but brands currently use their existing supply chain in Europe and Asia for repairs. As you can imagine, shipping a bag to China to be repaired costs money, time and carbon emissions- it’s a huge pain point for a brand to offer this to a customer. It is a much smarter, cheaper and more efficient decision to have that item repaired here (if the customer is here).

BY VIVE’s operations are mostly a network of trusted artisans across the US (Florida, New York, Ohio, Texas). Some of the skills needed are highly specialized (like rare stone matching), while others are more easily sourced (like leather staining). All brands have different needs and different specializations. Jesse shared that he wants to make the business more vertical, but there will always be the need of the artisan network to take advantage of certain special skills.

BY VIVE is focusing on luxury where there are good margins. Fashion, or regular priced clothing and accessories, is hard- there is certainly less financial wiggle room for repair on a $100 dress than a $900 handbag!

Retail?

As a cheerleader for the local economy, I was curious how the retail element of Jesse’s business is going. He shared that STORE 5a is 8 years old, and while he loves it, it is extremely competitive to be in the luxury resale market. The hardest part is acquiring the goods: you either pay top dollar and/or spend a ton of money to get people to come to your site. The in-store business really helps boost online sales by giving BY VIVE credibility and allowing new clients to find them.  

Big picture, as luxury sales continue to increase around the world, luxury brands can opt-out of vertical after-sales services and let BY VIVE and other repair vendors handle this phase of the customer journey. I appreciate that Jesse’s interest is being a white label solution for luxury brands because I want to see these brands continue to tend to the relationship with their customer and with their product years after that first sale.

Endineering

To that end, I wanted to mention Joe Macleod and Endineering. Joe has a book and teaches courses on the ‘end’ of products. I attended his workshop at Greenbiz’s Circularity Conference earlier this year and loved his high-level, historical and conceptual approach to ‘endings’. My biggest takeaway from this short workshop was the idea that our society trains people to be skilled buyers (the more you buy the better), but we just abandon people and the objects they’ve bought after the act of the purchase. Kind of like, “Yes! Good job! Watch that ad, compare that price. Way to buy that thing. Oh, now you own it? Bye!” I’m taking his class this September and am looking forward to learning more.

Have a great week,

Cynthia
Owner, Molte Volte
Your Resale + Reuse Guide