Paradise Galleria opened in October 2024 in Ohio City and offers customers a unique shopping experience unlike any other vintage shop. The 13,000 Square feet of the property are full wall-to-wall of vintage memorabilia, clothing, unique tchotchkes, and so much more. This vintage shop is much more than just a vintage store; it aims to be a vintage mall, with an entirely different feeling and atmosphere in each room you enter.
Store owners Cassie Trainer and Haley Morris had a vision for Paradise Galleria. They wanted to make their store more of an experience, like being transported to a different realm with each room you enter.
“We tried to make it not just a vintage store but also a shopping experience, where you walk through and you’re transported into a different realm, a different time,” Trainer said.
This idea of being transported through time and through different places works very well with the quirky doorways and entrances that are staple features of Paradise Galleria, such as the fridge that turns into a wardrobe into the teen dream bedroom or the slide from the 80s cassette and arcade room into the basement, which houses most of the mall’s vintage fashion.
“I think the slide that went down to their main clothing collection was the best,” Delaney Ives said.
A big part of what makes Paradise Galleria so appealing and a must-see location is its versatility; one moment, you’re in a vintage 50’s-style kitchen with pastel pink walls and cakes everywhere. The next moment, you’re in a Y2K bedroom meant to emulate the “teenage dream” feel at the time.
“Everybody is kind of drawn to a different decade, and I love how many there are for whatever decade you are interested in,” Talullah Taylor said.
This versatility goes beyond having different rooms for different decades; the shop has clothing, accessories, furniture, and memorabilia from the 1920s up to the modern day. Paradise Galleria is a uniquely curated vintage shop with items you won’t find at any other vintage shop or thrift store. To perfectly curate their collection, co-owners Trainer and Morris utilize the help of vintage vendors. Each of their vendors has a different and unique taste, resulting in the eccentric mix of fashion, objects, and furniture available at Paradise Galleria.
“We have 24 vintage vendors so we kind of curated this space based on people we have known in the vintage community for many years, who we love, what they do, and we tried to find an eclectic mix of different styles and decades,” Trainer said.
A big part of shopping vintage for shop owners and consumers is the sustainability of buying secondhand. When talking to the owners of Paradise Galleria and customers, it’s clear that sustainability is one of the most significant components of shopping vintage. Most clothing made today will end up in a landfill before the end of the year, and any clothes thrown away don’t biodegrade quickly. It takes 1-5 years for certain fabrics to biodegrade, And by that time 100 billion more will be created and thrown out again. This is why sustainable fashion via thrift and vintage stores is so important.
“Sustainability is a really big thing for me,” Trainer said. “We have so much waste every day going into landfills, it’s actually really terrifying. I love the idea of re-purposing housewares, garments, etc. Those things used to be so much better than they are now.”
Things are made today with less quality and care. Furniture is no longer wood; it is particle board. Clothes aren’t made of pure cotton anymore; they are cotton-polyester blends, which makes the fabric cheaper. When shopping second hand at stores like Paradise Galleria, the jump in quality is immediately noticeable.
“Buying second hand is really important because a lot of the clothes that are brand new are often not as good of quality as clothes that were made say 30-40 years ago,” Ives said.
Paradise Galleria truly is a unique, must-see spot in Ohio City. Its eccentric aesthetic, sustainability goal, and fun little quirks, like the slide and the ball pit, help to make Paradise Galleria unlike any other vintage shop in the area.
