About vapova
Our story
An East Village studio that curates and restores vintage designer heels. Five years in, 1,200 pairs placed.
vapova started the way most neighborhood vintage obsessions do: a single closet in an East Village walk-up, one very specific category, and one piece that wouldn’t leave us alone. A pair of 1980s Coach Manhattan slingbacks pulled from a downtown estate sale, refit by a cobbler on the Lower East Side, and placed with a buyer for $200 in less than a week.
Five years later, that habit has placed over 1,200 pairs of vintage heels with buyers across the United States, Canada, the UK, and Japan. We hold a five-star rating on Depop. We are still independent, still in Manhattan, still curating pieces one at a time.
What we look for
We focus on a small set of houses where vintage is genuinely worth the search: Coach (the early NYC era, 1970s through the early Stadium years), Prada (Spring 1996 forward, especially the Sport line), Gucci (logo loafers, Tom Ford era), Ferragamo, Manolo Blahnik, Roger Vivier, and Versace. We avoid fast-fashion vintage. We don’t list pieces we wouldn’t wear ourselves.
Where we look
The American supply was exhausted in our second year. We now source across eight markets: the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Australia, and Japan. Italy and Japan are the strongest \u2014 Italy because pieces stayed close to home; Japan because Japanese collectors keep pieces in better condition than anywhere else on earth. A 1990s Prada Sport mule from Tokyo arrives in a box, with the original dust bag, looking the way it looked when it left Milan.
What we do before we list
Every piece is logged with its source, photographed in daylight, and inspected. We document what we see: a scuffed heel, a worn footbed, a missing hardware screw. If the piece needs cobbler work, it goes to one of three independent NYC cobblers we trust before we put it on Depop \u2014 the work shows up in the description, by name. The buyer is never guessing.
Where we’re going
vapova is becoming a system. We’re building software that helps us find pieces faster, rank them better, and list them across more places without losing the curatorial edge that got us a five-star rating. We’ve also begun a buyout program for sellers with a vintage pair or a small collection \u2014 if you have something, tell us.
Buying on Depop is the most direct way to shop. @theweekend is updated weekly. For everything else, we’re here.