Always find yourself pulled into Green Street’s cosy vintage shop on your way to Mainsburys? Emma Jameson-Dake speaks to Goldrush’s manager Dave to learn about all things vintage After the horrors of Week 5, there’s nothing like a bit of retail therapy. When the sun’s already setting on your post-supo trek to Mainsburys, Goldrush Vintage’s glowing storefront display is more tempting than ever (and more of a threat to my dwindling bank balance!). I spoke to Goldrush’s manager, Dave, about what goes on behind the scenes. “When I started, if you wore vintage or second-hand clothes, you were a little bit alternative. Now it doesn’t seem to be like that anymore” “We opened here last December, so we’re nearly a year old now. And, yeah, it’s going good.” Dave tells me he’s been in the vintage business for over 25 years now, which he jokes is “too long”. Starting on London’s Portobello Road, he moved to Camden Town before finally settling in Cambridge, where business is thriving. “When I started, if you wore vintage or second-hand clothes, you were a little bit alternative. You were a little bit out there. You know? Now it doesn’t seem to be like that anymore”. When I ask what kind of vintage pieces he sells most often, Dave doesn’t hesitate in telling me, “it’s probably anything Carhartt”. The rail of jackets beside us is a treasure-trove of suede, leather, and wool, perfect for the winter weather. As I mention the seasonal wardrobe shift, Dave tells me “knitwear does really well in this shop which is quite surprising because other places I’ve been to, not so much, but Cambridge folk like proper knitwear [...] that you wouldn’t necessarily associate with students or young people”. It seems that the majority of customers are students, though Dave tells me this is actually only by a small margin. “We get a lot of regular people that just... like the whole vintage selling thing. It’s just like, oh, it’s a Ralph Lauren shirt. It’s 15 quid. Why wouldn’t I?” — the joys of a good bargain are evidently universal, we laugh. Goldrush certainly knows a thing or two about the joys of thrift finds; you need only see the staff wardrobes to recognise this. “My absolute favourite piece is a genuine 1977 Sex Pistols T-Shirt [...] rare as hen’s teeth”, which Dave scored for just “a fiver”. He reveals the shop is similarly a hit with school pupils and “exchange students” from France and Germany, smiling when he says that it’s nice to see “youngsters” appreciating all things vintage. It’s clear that Dave and his team value customers greatly and are always looking for the best finds for shoppers. When I ask where Goldrush sources their incredible variety of stock, the answer surprises me: it’s mostly from the States. Dave explains how 75% of stock comes from across the Atlantic, and then “we get some of the sportswear from mainland Europe, Holland mainly... track tops, track pants. There’s European workwear as well, which is completely different to the sort of American Carhartt”. Dave looks to trends for his pricing, buying in bulk and seeking out the hidden gems: “in that mix of work jackets, about a hundred work jackets, 10 are going to be Carhartt... the rest sell very well as well, but not for anywhere near as much. So you kind of have to, you know, get that little bit extra the way you can.” “So what they’re selling in Sweden now, this time next year, we’ll be selling it here.” Though it seems to me that Dave is an expert in his field by now, when I ask if he’s able to predict next season’s trends based on consumer habits, he’s bashful in admitting “I don’t necessarily spend my time looking at styles or fashion or that sort of thing” on social media, so can’t divulge much! Joking about screen time, Dave moves on to tell me that social media is far from the all-powerful style oracle: “one of my biggest suppliers has got a few shops around the place, and he’s got one in Sweden. And, he’s done it twice as long as I have. So I take a little bit of advice from him, and he always says Sweden is ahead of the curve. So what they’re selling in Sweden now, this time next year, we’ll be selling it here.” Despite the insider intel, Dave admits “it’s really difficult. I’ve done it or I’ve tried it before where you think you know what’s coming and you jump on it and you’re too early and it just doesn’t work”, citing the Carhartt jackets he’s been selling since the nineties, which only saw a boom post-lockdown. “It’s things like this, just actual vintage. You know, somebody wore that to school in 1979” Dave tells me that jackets are by far his favourite thing to sell, bringing me over to a rail bursting with history: “if the shop could be filled with this, happy days. I would love it”. The pull of these items seems unquestionable, “the thing is that it’s things like this, just actual vintage. You know, somebody wore that to school in 1979. So, I was 2”, Dave remarks, yet surprisingly reveals “this doesn’t sell. Sold one of these today, but that’s the only one I think sold this week”. We look at German fishermen’s jackets, army apparel from Korea, Vietnam, and the Second World War. The rails are heavy with history, which Dave explains makes them all the more special: “the pattern’s called Cowichan” he says, as we look at a beautiful horseshoe print cardigan which owes its pattern to “traditional Native American” culture. READ MORE Formalwear finds and the art of the thrift flip Dave is tireless in his research of clothes’ history, though divulges that nowadays, technology is offering a helping hand: “thanks to Google Lens, you don’t have to buy all the books anymore. You just snapshot it, and it tells you what it is. So that was quite interesting”. Technology holds a surprising place in the future of something so nestled in the past, and Dave is privy to the future of online shopping (spoiler alert: Vinted has new competition). Whatnot, Dave tells me, is “an American thing, and they’ve not long launched over here, and it’s livestream selling. You can start at whatever price you want, but it’s more like an auction. Fifteen seconds. And then if somebody bids, it goes up ten seconds. [...] I’ve not done one yet, but we’re going to go live with that very soon.” On the topic of the store’s future, I wryly ask Dave about the newly sprung-up competition in Cambridge. He’s humble and laughs in response, “I’m fairly new myself so I can’t get too possessive!” Speaking of large-scale chains, and the “big boys”, he admits “they’ve got a big budget, which I don’t necessarily. But no, since they opened it, to be honest, it’s been as good as ever”. There’s something about the appeal of a smaller business which we both agree on. Sustainability, for instance, is always at the forefront of Goldrush’s mind. Dave tells me that “we get very little waste in the sense of damaged product”, which accounts for around 5% of stock. Modern clothes also find their way into vintage stock bundles, which don’t sell as well. Dave puts brands like Zara, H&M and ASOS on marked-down sale rails (“it’s too good to throw away”) and reveals a further secret in the shop’s ethical sustainability: “we do donate quite a bit as well. We’ve worked with charities in Gambia”. My final question to him is about any extra secrets of the vintage store he’s willing to share: “I would say that one of the things we do that — I’m not saying the others don’t — but a lot of vintage stores don’t launder everything. [...] If it can be laundered, it’s laundered. If it can’t, such as leather or suede, it’s hand cleaned.” He’s keen to make sure the “loft style” smell of vintage shops is replaced with cleanliness in Goldrush, and certifies every item is top quality. Dave’s parting words to me are emphatic of the energy he puts into selling vintage: “if you were looking for a tracksuit top today, you went through all of them and you thought, you know, ‘there’s not one I quite like. I’ll go and check again next week or the week after.’ I want them all to be different”. There’s something for everyone to be found on the rails at Goldrush Vintage.
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RADNOR, Pa., Dec. 22, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The law firm of Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP ( www.ktmc.com ) informs investors that a securities class action lawsuit has been filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of New York against Wolfspeed, Inc. (“Wolfspeed”) (NYSE: WOLF) on behalf of those who purchased or otherwise acquired Wolfspeed securities between August 16, 2023, and November 6, 2024, inclusive (the “Class Period”). The lead plaintiff deadline is January 17, 2025. CONTACT KESSLER TOPAZ MELTZER & CHECK, LLP: If you suffered Wolfspeed losses, you may CLICK HERE or go to: https://www.ktmc.com/new-cases/wolfspeed-inc?utm_source=PR&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=wolf&mktm=r You can also contact attorney Jonathan Naji, Esq. by calling (484) 270-1453 or by email at info@ktmc.com . DEFENDANTS’ ALLEGED MISCONDUCT: The complaint alleges that, throughout the Class Period, Defendants made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (1) Wolfspeed’s optimistic claims of potential growth of its Mohawk Valley fabrication facility and general demand for Wolfspeed’s 200mm wafers in the electronic vehicle market fell short of reality; and (2) Wolfspeed had overstated demand for its key product and placed undue reliance on purported design wins while the Mohawk Valley facility’s growth had begun to taper before recognizing the $100 million revenue per quarter allegedly achievable with only 20% utilization of the fabrication, let alone the promised $2 billion revenue purportedly achievable by the facility. Please CLICK HERE to view our video or copy and paste this link into your browser: https://youtu.be/zMLfnSRjg2Y THE LEAD PLAINTIFF PROCESS: Wolfspeed investors may, no later than January 17, 2025, seek to be appointed as a lead plaintiff representative of the class through Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP or other counsel, or may choose to do nothing and remain an absent class member. A lead plaintiff is a representative party who acts on behalf of all class members in directing the litigation. The lead plaintiff is usually the investor or small group of investors who have the largest financial interest and who are also adequate and typical of the proposed class of investors. The lead plaintiff selects counsel to represent the lead plaintiff and the class and these attorneys, if approved by the court, are lead or class counsel. Your ability to share in any recovery is not affected by the decision of whether or not to serve as a lead plaintiff. Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP encourages Wolfspeed investors who have suffered significant losses to contact the firm directly to acquire more information. ABOUT KESSLER TOPAZ MELTZER & CHECK, LLP: Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP prosecutes class actions in state and federal courts throughout the country and around the world. The firm has developed a global reputation for excellence and has recovered billions of dollars for victims of fraud and other corporate misconduct. All of our work is driven by a common goal: to protect investors, consumers, employees and others from fraud, abuse, misconduct and negligence by businesses and fiduciaries. The complaints in this action were not filed by Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP. For more information about Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP please visit www.ktmc.com . CONTACT: Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP Jonathan Naji, Esq. (484) 270-1453 280 King of Prussia Road Radnor, PA 19087 info@ktmc.com May be considered attorney advertising in certain jurisdictions. Past results do not guarantee future outcomes.Marcus Smart to have finger injury reevaluated in two weeks
A s I write, there’s a window on my laptop screen that is providing a live view of a stampede. It’s logging the numbers of people joining the social network Bluesky . At the moment, the number of registered users is 20.5 million. By the time you read this there will be more than 30 million of them, judging by the rate that people are currently joining. The proximate cause of it is the role that Elon Musk, owner of X (née Twitter), played in the election of Donald Trump, when a significant proportion of the platform’s 200 million-plus users realised that they’d been had – that they had, in effect, been useful idiots for Musk on his path to the centre of political power. There had been an “Xodus” once before – in October 2022, when Musk took over Twitter – as people fled to a new, open-source network called Mastodon , but it was on a much smaller scale. At its peak in November 2022 it had 2.5 million users, but that number has dropped to just under 1 million now. The stampede to Bluesky is on an altogether bigger scale. The puzzle, in a way, is why it took so long for the penny to drop; after all, many X users have been hostile to Musk for quite a while. The answer, in a nutshell, was network effects. They may not have liked the platform, but that’s where everyone was. “Twitter was the place people in my business had to be,” wrote the Nobel laureate and economist Paul Krugman. “What I used Twitter for was to learn from and interact with people possessing real expertise, sometimes in areas I know pretty well, sometimes in areas I don’t, like international relations and climate policy.” But now Krugman is on Bluesky because, he says, it has suddenly “reached critical mass, in the sense that most of the people I want to hear from are now posting there. The raw number of users is still far smaller than X’s, but as far as I can tell, Bluesky is now the place to find smart, useful analysis.” I stopped using Twitter when Musk bought it, tried Mastodon (and was unimpressed) and only recently joined Bluesky. At the moment, it feels eerily like Twitter in its very early days, when the platform enabled one to plug straight into the thought-streams of people one admired. “For now,” as web veteran Ian Bogost put it last week, “Bluesky invokes the feeling of carefree earnestness that once – really and truly – blanketed the internet as a whole.” It does. What’s distinctive about it? Four things. Unlike Mastodon, it’s as easy as Twitter to use. There’s no overall algorithmic curation – you can “roll your own feed”, as someone put it – decide who you want to hear from. Every user is entitled to “free speech” but nobody gets “free reach” via a profit-driven algorithm. And finally, it runs on an open technical protocol that’s accessible to anyone; the underlying philosophy is that social networking is too important for any one company to control it. So anyone with the requisite technical smarts could set up their own network using the protocol. This doesn’t mean that network effects lose their power, but it could be that the momentum of the stampede away from X, plus the power of an open protocol, means that we are seeing the beginning of the “splintering of social media ”. If this has the effect of eroding the monopolistic grip on people’s attention currently enjoyed by Meta, X, LinkedIn and TikTok, then it’ll be a welcome development. At least people will then be freer to choose their favourite hypnotist. But it won’t solve the bigger problem – which is what social media is doing to us and to our societies. The technology is at worst toxic and at best disabling for a democracy’s public sphere. Humans are a social species, but – as Robin Dunbar pointed out aeons ago – there’s a cognitive limit (about 150) to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships, and it mostly boils down to around 15 souls with whom one has meaningful exchanges. As a species, we didn’t evolve to be constantly talking to everyone. Addiction to social media, though – as Ian Bogost points out – means that we have to pay attention to the multitudes that turn up in our algorithmically curated feeds. Bluesky may make those feeds more congenial, but it won’t change the fact that we are still reduced to communicating in channels with a bandwidth not much wider than that of smoke signals. Here’s where we went wrong Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now? Interesting New York Times column by David Brooks. It’s a conservative’s apologia pro vita sua . What Decca did next Jessica Mitford’s Escape from Fascism. A nice essay by Noah McCormack in the New Republic on Mitford’s book Hons and Rebels . Things to come What the future looks like from here. Dave Karpf’s perceptive and realistic list of the consequences of Trump’s victory.