How it started
My Dead Grandpa was founded by siblings Ben, Isaac and Esther and opened in February 2025.
The idea came from seeing how many good local sellers were already building businesses through markets, online stores, spare rooms and weekend pop-ups. We wanted to give those sellers a permanent place to trade, while giving customers one shop where they could browse a much wider mix of vintage, secondhand and locally made goods.
The store grew from there.
What kind of store is it?
My Dead Grandpa is a marketplace made up of independent sellers. It sits somewhere between a vintage store, an antique centre and a very large collection that got slightly out of hand.
The stock is selected, priced and restocked by the sellers themselves. There is no single buyer deciding what belongs in the shop.
That is why carefully sourced designer fashion can sit a few metres from a tested film camera, a rack of Y2K surfwear, old VHS tapes, comics or a piece of furniture that definitely would not fit in a hatchback.
More than clothing
Vintage clothing is a big part of the store, but it is only one part.
Across the shop you can find records, CDs, DVDs, VHS tapes, books, comics, cameras, furniture, homewares, toys, jewellery, posters, magazines, gaming, collectables and locally designed goods.
Some pieces are valuable. Others are practical, sentimental or just too strange to leave behind. The shop has room for all of it.
Built around independent sellers
The sellers decide what goes into their own spaces, price it themselves and return throughout the week to restock.
Some keep their range tightly focused. Others change things constantly depending on what they have found. One seller might specialise in 1970s homewares while another brings in vintage cameras, streetwear or whatever unusual object has followed them home that week.
That variety is what gives the shop its shape.
You can meet many of the sellers through our Meet the Crew profiles, where they talk about what they sell, why they do it and how they got started.
Why the name My Dead Grandpa?
That is a question we have been asked at least a hundred times.
Some hear the name and grimace in horror. Others laugh hysterically. What would possess us to give a marketplace such a bizarre, outlandish name?
The joke I like to tell people is that our now late grandpa asked us to name the business after him.
That is a little bit of a tall tale.
The truer story is that when we were starting the business, we were talking to a friend about it. He told us that, as a kid, he used to destroy jeans to make them look vintage and called his little side hustle My Dead Grandpa.
He said the name would almost be perfect for us.
We all hated it.
But then we also kind of liked it. A lot.
There was so much meaning, history and irony packed into that one name. In some ways, it felt like paying homage to everyone who had gone before us, in a “walk a mile in their shoes” kind of way.
But we knew it had to pass the litmus test.
We asked our very-much-alive grandpa.
He loved it.
