Going junkin’ has always been a way of life for Lindsay Dalton, founder of NoMAD, a “funky little consignment shop on Highway 3.” Thrifting used to be how she and her mother survived, but as she grew older she began to consider it a sport. Now, it’s a full-time business venture.
As an only child of a single mom, Dalton and her mother relied on garage sales and thrift shops to get the necessities. As she grew up, it became less about the fundamentals and more about the thrill, she said. The thrill of the hunt.
“You get a thrill out of finding something unusual, something at a good price,” she said. “Something unique. Something maybe you had as a child that brings back some sort of memory.”
People live in a “society of stuff” these days, she said. Goods and services are at the reach of one’s fingertips from a keyboard with online orders and to-door deliveries. For Dalton, it’s important to take an inventory of one’s possessions and consider that things not being used by one could still hold value for another.
That’s what NoMAD is for. The consignment and thrift store isn’t Dalton’s first venture, but it is her most ambitious yet. She got her start with a mobile shop that she operated out of an Airstream trailer, a 1979 Safari Land Yacht, in Winterpark, Grand County.
When Dalton and her husband moved to Durango in 2020, she took a teaching job at Escalante Middle School because she’d been doing it for 16 years and considered teaching a passion. But she had another passion that she wondered if she could spin into a full-time career.
She had her eyes on the building at 919 Colorado Highway 3 in Durango. It made for a great place to open a thrift store because of all the built-in nooks and crannies to place items in a way that coming across one felt like a discovery, she said. In June 2021, she caught wind that it was opening up for rent.
Dalton opened NoMAD just short of a year ago on Sept. 1.
When curious customers walk into the NoMAD thrift store and consignment shop, they are likely to be greeted by the tunes of Tom Waits, J.J. Cale, Fleetwood Mac or Dire Straits and a plethora of rustic clothing, knickknacks, art, baubles and trinkets.
She said the calming, welcoming atmosphere she has created in NoMAD is what helps it stand out from other thrift stores in Durango.
Dalton said she doesn’t quite know how to describe the vibe that she’s curated. It isn’t just vintage and it isn’t just Western, but it certainly has a vintage Western feel. Her daughter said the store’s aesthetic is that of a “mountain gypsy.”
There are rustic wares such as belts and belt buckles, prints by Durango artist Matt Clark’s Lil’ Bud Designs, dresses that fit the “mountain gypsy” look and a collection of books of various genres.
When Dalton was still working out exactly what her thrift store would look like, she had several visions to pursue. One of them was an artists collective or a workshop, she said.
She considered opening up studio space, but the building she purchased wasn’t the best option for that. Still, she didn’t want to abandon her vision of supporting artists entirely, so she hosts locally created art and a handful of artists who put on mini galleries from time to time.
“A majority of it (art) is upcycled in some way or repurposed in a thoughtful way, mindfully,” she said. “We’ve got a couple of different digital artists who will take original ads and things from the 1950s and then put their own spin on it. So it’s maybe not made out of recycled something, but the idea has now been recycled, which I think is really cool.”
NoMAD hosts print art, jewelry, macramé and found objects.
“People really enjoy the funky nature that our local artists bring to the store,” she said.
Dalton has also experimented in pop-up galleries or art spaces for artists. She said she is open to trying more pop-ups, but with the lack of foot traffic, artists’ time might be better spent in other ways.
The typical customer at the NoMAD is a young woman in her early 20s, Dalton said. But she tries to have clothing sizes and styles for everyone regardless of age or size.
“Some of those are harder to come by than others,” she said. “But I’ll go out junkin’ myself and I know exactly what I’m looking for because it’s the stuff that’s hard to find here. So I’m trying to curate that collection a little more.”
Dalton said she gets visitors every day who have driven past her shop for months and finally decided to stop in. Colorado Highway 3 isn’t exactly the best location for attracting foot traffic, so getting NoMAD’s name out there is still a work in progress.
The second most common thing Dalton hears from customers is that they learned of her consignment shop through word-of-mouth.
Dalton said Durango has a healthy thrift shop scene and she goes shopping at other thrift stores.
“The demand for good thrift is high enough here where the turnover at these stores is pretty good,” she said. “So you don’t walk into the Methodist Thrift Store and see the same stuff you saw there last time.”
Dalton said her relationships with other thrift store owners are pretty good, particularly with ReLove Consign & Design. Sometimes she has customers who were referred to her by ReLove; other times, she refers customers to them. She’s also referred people to Rose Duds and Second Time Around on Main Avenue.
“It’s a very friendly and helpful relationship that we all have among each other,” she said.
Dalton prides herself on coming up with her plan for NoMAD in a school project she designed for her students while she was teaching in Grand County. She gave her students an assignment where they had to choose a person, product, business or idea in Grand County and create a marketing campaign around it.
Leading by example, Dalton designed a thrift store so that students would have a frame of reference for their own projects.
“Students in our community were able to come see this very thing that they heard me talking about, saw me build right alongside them,” she said. “And some of them went on to actually do things that they had put together, too.”
NoMAD was featured as one of the nominees for the Business Improvement District’s 2022 Best Of Awards in the Antique Shop category. Dalton said she thinks NoMAD would fit better under Consignment Shop category, but she’ll take what she can get.
cburney@durangoherald.com
