Secondhand Switchboard

How one local business in Charlottesville is connecting its community to great gear and a more sustainable future.

Four years ago, Seth Herman and Erin James were hungry for change. For some, the boredom and monotony of the 9-5 brings on the desire for a new career, but Seth and Erin’s careers were anything but. Erin was a middle school teacher and Seth traveled the world, working in the music industry.

Their jobs were fulfilling, exciting, yet the time for something new had come.

“When I was home, working on the computer, there was no interaction with the Charlottesville public. All the work I did affected communities outside of Virginia,” Seth recalls. “I was worried that our kids would be raised seeing their dad on the computer and not feeling any local effect of that work.”

So, in 2017, with their first son on his way and a deep desire to connect with their community, the two conceived an idea.

It all began with some baby clothes

“When Seth left his career in the music industry, he didn’t know what he was going to do,” remembers Erin.

But when garbage bags full of baby items started appearing outside their door, the wheels in their minds started to turn.

“Bags of clothing would show up on our porch from friends or mothers and fathers we didn’t really even know. It really resonated. So much of what we need already exists in our community, and it’s something that someone else doesn’t need anymore. We just need to make that connection.”

High Tor Gear Exchange is born

When High Tor opened its doors to consignors in January 2018, you could ride a mountain bike around the empty room--someone actually did. But the community soon came to fill it with tents and t-shirts, kayaks and pants, backpacks and bike racks and boots.

“We opened the store thinking that consignors would want to sell their products with us to earn money,” Seth says. “But that was a pretty misguided conception. We found, instead, we were offering them a platform to let go of something they cared about a lot.”

As a member of the circular economy, High Tor Gear Exchange takes aim at the conundrum in every outdoor enthusiast’s heart. We need quality gear to get outside and do the things we love, and as we delve more deeply into our outdoor niches--be it backpacking, climbing, kayaking, biking--we often need to upgrade to more specialized equipment--even though our old stuff still has life in it.

“Consumption isn’t a cycle that has to end with one use,” Seth says. “ Many times we go to the shop and see a hat or pair of pants that we love, and we put it on and it’s just not the right fit. And we don’t have another one in stock. What’s there is there. So if you need to buy a new coat because it’s the right coat for you and you’re going to get good use out of it, we are still able to provide you a service. You can bring us your old coat. You could bring us that coat when you’re through with it.”

Closing the loop: The shift from a linear economy to a circular one

As part of the zero-waste initiative, the circular economy pushes back against our culture’s linear economic model, in which we take raw resources to make new products to use for a short time and then throw away.

Disposability is hard-baked into Americans. Collectively, we throw away 26 billion pounds of textiles and clothing each year--about 81 pounds per person--even though 95 percent of it can be reused or recycled. For every pound thrown out, 87 times that is wasted from extraction industries, such as mining, timber, agriculture, and petroleum, according to the World Resources Institute.

On the other hand, the circular emphasizes product quality and longevity, minimises resource use, and takes the option to waste off the table by using products and their constituent parts again and again. It asks: what if we built a system that looked at waste not as an inevitable by-product of a growing consumer economy, but as a missed opportunity, a resource in itself?

“We’re just hoping to make it easier for people to plug into that,” says Seth.

Connecting to the circular economy is good for the wallet, the environment, and happiness

Plug in, connect, circle back, cycle through. These were the words and concepts Seth and Erin dwelled on as we spoke. They told me stories of consignors who became customers, consignors who took their profit and put it right back into the store, of kayaks and backpacks consigned and sold again and again and again.

Marketing analytics show the shop to be a place where people of all ages and demographics come to share and join into a measurable, local economy, and to find joy.

Buying used gear cuts costs and possible feelings of consumer guilt that buying a new product might cause while enabling you to connect to the great outdoors and the community you live in. It’s thrilling to discover one-of-a-kind, brand-name items for pennies on the dollar. Outdoor apparel tends to be spendy, and finding a desired item you can’t otherwise afford is a special kind of magic.

“For as many times as you might not find what you need, there’s just as many times that you’re surprised,” Erin says. “The exact thing you’re looking for exists and there it is!”

A labor of love, built by the community

The store has come a long way from the barren mountain bike track it was in January 2018. Consignors have answered the calls for gear, and the walls, constructed and painted by friends and family, are full of gently-worn, deeply-loved stories. A table featuring the products of other local, socially-responsible companies catches your eye right as you walk in the door. To the right is the coolest collection of vintage stoves I’ve ever seen.

I feel as though I’ve walked into a good friend’s well-stocked gear closet rather than a retail establishment. It’s so much more than a simple mom-and-pop business, or even one more solution in the fight against resource depletion and climate change.

High Tor Gear Exchange is a modern embodiment of the human desire, ancient as the days when we lived in self-contained, resilient societies, to be intimately linked to a locality and its resources.

“When you’re expecting a new family member, it makes you think a lot about what kind of parent you want to be and what’s important to you,” Seth told me. “And the shop was a way to put that front and center.”

Like the hub at the center of a wheel, it is spoked with deeply-held values--family, friendship, a good, old barnraising love for community, environmental stewardship, an abiding passion for the outdoors, and the gear that gets us there. Together, they form the wheel and turn it.