Hana Elster (Questrom’26) recently launched VYA, a website that brings vintage clothing customers and sellers together on one platform. She says her education at BU’s Questrom School of Business helped hone the skills she needed to start her own business. Photos by Chloe Hannum

Student Life

BU Student Launches Vintage Resale Platform

Hana Elster has created a website where customers can browse from over 30 vintage stores, all in one place

There’s the RealReal. There’s ThredUp. And now there’s VYA.

The vintage resale platform—one of the first of its kind—is the brainchild of Hana Elster (Questrom’26). It launched in March after months of planning and has so far partnered with over 30 vintage stores from around the globe to provide a single online destination to shop for vintage clothing and accessories. “There’s literally everything for everyone because I wanted to make it accessible for people,” says Elster. “I want people to find something that they wouldn’t find anywhere else.”

To access the platform, customers first sign up for the waitlist (you can move up faster on the list by referring other people). Once you’re off the list, you have access to the site, where you can browse listed items. Users can refine their search based on stores, categories, designers, collections, and sourcing requests. “Instead of jumping into a big search, I could go straight into a particular store,” says VYA fan Patricia Rehfield. “Or I could go in, and I could filter down to just dresses…. [I] just found that easier because it was a more manageable result that you get.”

The clothing selection includes a variety of styles, aesthetics, and fashion eras, and each store VYA works with has its own unique vibe, Elster says. Prices range from well under $100 to more than $3,000, based on the provenance of the item. “I wasn’t sure if it would [have clothing] in my price range and be something that I would use regularly,” says Annie Levy (COM’26), a classmate of Elster and a newly minted VYA customer. “But I think [Elster is] keeping it so updated and has so many different options and sellers that I feel like I definitely would look again and buy again.” 

Elster says she reached out to many of her partner retailers after finding and messaging them on social media. 

One of those partners, Leila Hedayat (COM’25), the founder of LEI Vintage, says she’s already had some sales through VYA and that she’s seen increased traffic on her shop’s website and social media channels. “It’s definitely made a difference,” she says.

Customer outreach mainly involves social media, like TikTok and Instagram, Elster says, adding that she tries to contact users who interact with the posts to begin building relationships with her customers. “It’s really important to your customers to know that you’re on the same level as them,” Elster says. 

Unlike a typical online store, where there are duplicates of the same item in the inventory, the pieces posted on VYA are usually the only one of their kind. “It’s definitely an interesting and less easy-to-scale market, because everything is one of one,” Elster says. “So inventory turnover is very high. You can’t sell a bunch of items at once [of] the same product. Once you sell one thing, it’s gone.”

Levy says she found a shirt she liked through VYA—a process that was “easy and accessible.” Once she saw other people had liked the piece on the platform, she says she thought about purchasing it for a night, before eventually buying it the next day. Rehfield says she found a dress on VYA for a wedding that she “never would have found anywhere else.” 

Apart from the online platform, VYA has also hosted a pop-up market in New York City in March that brought 10 of the partnered stores together to sell their items in person. Hedayat says she met other sellers in the vintage resale space through the event. “It was so nice to hear what they had to say and just watch them sell,” she says. “It was cool to see why people curated or bought [and] sell the things that they sell.” 

Elster says the Questrom School of Business’ core curriculum—a semester-long intensive program where students develop a project with a team—helped her get VYA off the ground. “There were so many things that I didn’t realize that would apply from being in class that would actually reflect in [launching a business],” Elster says. She adds that her marketing, operational, finance, and accounting classes also helped her determine factors like costs and profit percentage.

As for the future, she has big plans to continue growing her company and tapping into the ever-growing vintage market.

“I don’t even shop retail anymore. I only shop secondhand, and I’ve been doing that for years,” Elster says. “The market is insane. It’s like a $400 billion market globally, and I think it’s just going to keep growing from there. So many people are shifting to shopping vintage secondhand.”