How Emma Rogue Turned Depop Into a Vintage Store
Emma Rogue's vintage empire started the same way most resale side hustles do: a single Depop listing, sold for spare change, that nobody expected to lead anywhere.
From New Jersey Thrift Runs to FIT
Emma grew up in Bedminster, New Jersey, where thrifting with her mom after gymnastics practice was a Saturday ritual long before it was a business. After graduating from NYU in 2017, she enrolled at FIT to study fashion business, pattern making, and sewing, and started building cut-and-sew denim from scratch with the goal of launching her own label.
The Depop Listing That Popped Off
Before the store, there was the app. Emma started selling on Depop and posting TikTok street style interviews, and one video showing how she packs her Depop orders went properly viral, according to Hypebae's 2021 feature on her rise. She picked up roughly 40,000 followers and 300 orders in the span of a week. That momentum carried her out of her apartment and into flea markets and pop-ups across Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Rogue Opens on the Lower East Side
Then covid hit, rents on the Lower East Side dropped, and Emma saw the kind of opening most people would have walked right past. She signed a lease and opened Rogue in June 2021, a brick-and-mortar vintage shop on Stanton Street stocked with clothing, jewelry, and trinkets, on a stretch of block that i-D later covered as NYC's emerging "TikTok block."
More Than a Store: A Community Stage
Rogue was never built to just move inventory. Emma turned the space into a stage for small businesses and emerging creatives, running dozens of pop-ups, designer closet sales, and vision board workshops, often with free food and snow cones for anyone who showed up. That community-first approach is part of what's drawn a steady stream of well-known faces through the door, including Post Malone, PinkPantheress, Joe Jonas, Benny Blanco, Tinashe, and Robert Pattinson.
What's Next: Rogue Academy
Emma's next chapter looks past the storefront entirely. "I want Rogue to be that creative catalyst for someone," she's said of her vision for Rogue Academy, a planned incubator for emerging designers, graphic artists, and musicians, extending the same eye for overlooked talent that built the store's inventory in the first place.
Emma built Rogue on pieces most people walked right past. If you're hunting for the same kind of one-of-one vintage find, Crawli searches every major secondhand marketplace at once, so the piece worth grabbing doesn't stay overlooked for long.