It’s a challenge to keep a small vintage clothing store afloat in high-overhead, hotly competitive Manhattan. It’s even more remarkable to grow that simple concept into the mini-empire called What Comes Around Goes Around. Founded as a single Soho boutique in 1993 by college friends Gerard Maione and Seth Weisser, today WCAGA is one of the nation’s premier vintage destinations for the public and fashion industry alike.

The company has expanded to include far more than a second retail store. Their 7,000-square-foot Archive caters to an exclusive clientele by appointment, to wholesale buyers from stores around the world, to designers seeking inspiration, and to costumers from Hollywood to Broadway. Their Antique Textile and Swatch Library is a go-to resource for the fashion, home design, and printmaking industries. And most recently, they added a Design Studio which houses the design, graphics, and sewing teams for their own collection — a vintage inspired contemporary line for men and women.

In The Tradition

Throughout WCAGA’s steady expansion, they’ve been loyal to two things: Their original vision of “elevating the vintage aesthetic from thrift-store to high-fashion,” says Seth Weisser. And their original decision to run the business on Macs.

As we grew, every need — for accounting, for a point-of-sale system, for keeping track of 100,000 unique garments in our inventory — we found could be easily handled by our Macs.

Unconventional Wisdom

“At every step, the conventional wisdom was to use PCs. But — even for managing our own new label from design to distribution, which was a whole new business paradigm for us — we did our homework, and realized the Mac solutions are out there. In fact, they’re easier and more reliable. And with all the tools built into Mac OS X, the whole Mac system has evolved to a point where we couldn’t imagine working without it.”

On the retail front, one of the company’s earliest choices was to use POS-IM for point-of-sale and inventory management. “Most retailers sell from a consistent stock, or have a consistent formula for how their inventory works,” Seth says. “But we have a situation where every item is essentially one-of-a-kind. When you’re dealing with antiques, the items you buy may sell the same day, or five years later. So our business demanded a database that was flexible enough to adapt, to include details of every item’s history. POS-IM for the Mac was — and is — easy to customize to our unique needs, even as our business has grown and changed.”