On a Wednesday afternoon at Flipstone Vintage & Thrift, a secondhand store in Fort Worth, two women are hunting for the perfect Christmas gift. One digs through a bin of scarves, trying to choose between polka dots and stripes, while the other homes in on the men’s section, pulling out a black T-shirt with the rapper Ice Cube on the front.

“I started to notice it last year on social media,” says Dancing Iglesias, 31, who co-owns Flipstone with her sister Lily Mekeel and her husband, Jesse. “But this year, it’s really taking off.”

“It” is the popularity of Christmas shopping at vintage and secondhand stores, what social media users have dubbed “Thriftmas.” On TikTok, more than 6,000 posts are tagged #thriftmas, mostly young women roaming the aisles looking for bargains or sharing their Thriftmas hauls — a glass dish, a funny mug, a clever matchbook. In one video, a fresh-faced young woman thrusts a Coach purse into the frame. “I have been thrifting all my Christmas gifts since May for my family,” she says with delight.

This kind of gift-giving is nearly the opposite of one-click on Amazon. The process takes time and consideration. You have to search and dig. In a convenience culture where anything from rare jewelry to last-minute groceries can be delivered to your doorstep, that may be part of the appeal.

“I’ve seen teenagers pushing their parents to thrift their gifts, almost like a challenge,” says Iglesias. “Can you find something I like among all these things as opposed to, say, going to a store and buying a gift box that’s already made?”

A survey by OfferUp found that 83% of Gen Zers planned to buy secondhand holiday gifts this year. OfferUp is an online resale marketplace, so take those numbers with a grain of salt, but its annual reports show a pattern: A steady uptick in the embrace of secondhand gifting, and not just among a younger generation. In 2024, 74% of people surveyed thought secondhand gifts had become more accepted in the past year, up 7% from 2023.

“People have become much more comfortable with secondhand,” says David Hynds, a longtime manager with Lula B’s, a vintage marketplace with locations in Oak Cliff and the Design District. “Television shows like Flea Market Flip, Storage Wars, American Pickers have all grown the market.”

At the counter of Flipstone, 46-year-old Erica Taylor is buying a comfy throw blanket as a white elephant gift, and she plans to buy most of her Christmas gifts from vintage stores.

“Growing up you hid the fact that you shopped secondhand,” she says. “The stigma is definitely gone. It’s the cool thing now.”

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A backlash to fast fashion

The story of Flipstone offers a peek at how thrifting went mainstream, along with Facebook Marketplace and ideas about sustainable fashion.

The sisters who own the shop, Iglesias and Mekeel, grew up in Oklahoma with two siblings, a rotating cast of cousins, foster kids and friends sharing the house, along with parents who were DIY out of necessity.

“We were poor,” says Iglesias. Her dad built countertops in their home, and her Lakota mother sewed curtains, reupholstered furniture and bought clothes at yard sales, often embellishing the fabric with lace, beads or patches so the clothes looked like they were bought from a boutique.

New clothes were a once-a-year event. This was the mall era of the ‘90s and aughts, and the sisters scoured the clearance racks of Rue 21, a store that went bankrupt earlier this year, in a sign of how commerce has changed.

Iglesias got married in 2017, and bargain-hunting was so ingrained in her she bought her wedding dress for $10 at Ross. The newlyweds decorated their home with furniture they’d spotted on the side of the road and moved to Fort Worth in 2018. About a year later, Iglesias started selling furniture she found for extra cash on Facebook Marketplace. Since its debut in 2016, Marketplace has lured secondhand shoppers who might never touch a yard sale and allowed people like Iglesias, a homebound new mother, to wheel-and-deal from the couch. One day, Iglesias placed a mid-century modern piece of furniture on the site, and her comments section exploded. She and her husband, Jesse, eventually decided to open an online furniture store.

At the same time, her younger sister Mekeel was working as a model and getting a bracing lesson in the churn of fast fashion, the rapid manufacture of cheaply made but on-trend clothing whose environmental damage has been the subject of eye-opening viral videos and books.

“I’ve been on jobs where there’s four sets shooting two models per set, and we’re each shooting 100 items per day,” says Mekeel. “So you can do the math there, but that’s how many items of new clothing these large brands are putting out.”

These dual realizations — how much could be salvaged, how much was being wasted — led the sisters to contemplate a thrift store they could run together. Vintage clothes and furniture were of such better quality. Similar epiphanies were dawning on a younger generation, starting to push back against the onslaught of Shein and Temu as celebrities like Rihanna and Bella Hadid turned vintage into a fashion statement.

Flipstone opened in May 2024 on White Settlement Road, not far from downtown Fort Worth. The busy street, whose name dates back to the forced removal of Native American tribes in the 19th century, underscored another cultural shift, because not only were Iglesias and Mekeel, both members of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, planting their flag in a place Native Americans once fled, but they were also saying as much on social media.

“Opening a Thrift Store in Texas [run] by America’s Indigenous peoples,” read a reel on Instagram that garnered the sisters attention before they’d even opened the store.

People in their family had discouraged them from touting their Native heritage. What if something bad happened? What if they were targeted? But visibility was important to the sisters, who knew of only one other Native-owned business in Fort Worth, Hooker’s Grill in the Stockyards. “It means a lot to see a Native woman making something happen!” Iglesias wrote in the Instagram caption.

Since then, the store has thrived and attracted more than 20,000 followers on Instagram, where the sisters — both beautiful, stylish and creative — post playful reels that gently poke fun at themselves. “Look at us making second hand living easy and luxurious,” said a recent post.

‘Am I gonna end up with an owl candle?’

One person whose attention they caught was Sarah Teresinski, a sustainable stylist and influencer who chose Flipstone as the location for a Dec. 20 segment about Christmas thrifting that will be airing live on Good Morning Texas on WFAA-TV (Channel 8). Currently living in the Hill Country, where she moved from Flower Mound, Teresinski has 200,000 followers on Instagram and more than 350,000 on TikTok under the brand Redeux Style, where she excels at upcycling, the creative act of transforming everyday items. One reel shows how to turn old ceiling fan blades into hooks for a front entryway, the kind of innovative aplomb that landed her on The Drew Barrymore Show and the Today show.

“People hear secondhand stores, and they’re like, am I gonna end up with an owl candle and a wreath? No! Think of a beautiful boutique hotel. You can make an amazing space and keep things out of a landfill,” says Teresinski, when I call to find out some of the wisdom she’ll be sharing on Friday.

“Thriftmas” is nothing new to Teresinski, who’s been doing holiday segments on how to thrift for years, but what’s new is the momentum and widespread enthusiasm.

“The rise of social media has taken things that people have done forever and made them take off,” she says. “People have access to these amazing creators who can show you how to do stuff on a budget. It’s like, wow, I can afford this!”

Gretchen Ball, the owner of Dolly Python in East Dallas and a sister store Oak Cliff, has seen Christmas vintage trends change over the years. “I tend to cater to people doing the kitschy side of Christmas, the ‘50s-’60s-’70s ornaments, the tinsel trees with rotating lights. Then Christmas sweaters paid the bill for years, but that died off because everyone has sweaters. Now they want secondhand gifts.”

She’s noticed how much care people bring to shopping vintage for Christmas. “They’re really thinking about the other person’s personality,” she says. “They make a vintage basket and put it together and it’s under $50.”

Back at Flipstone, a woman digging through the scarf section is looking for dress-up clothes to give her niece for Christmas. Rachel Harrison, 32, knows she could have bought presents on Amazon or at Target, but she liked the idea of something less ordinary.

“A lot of Target-y stuff feels soulless,” she says with a smile. “No hate on Target.” She shops at Target, but Christmas gifts are meant to be special. “I like that there’s a story there before I found it.”