It's a Wednesday just after one o'clock, and Kealan Sullivan is dismayed with her beautiful summer whites. Two full bags of second-hand schmatta stored in the basement of her 69 Vintage Collective boutique at 1207 Bloor Street West are suffering water-rot, and it's now a race to laundry

Even if she's running on little sleep after last week's quick New Jersey road trip for new-old stock, Sullivan can still relay her to-do's behind rented Budget car wheels. There's the tidying of the basement for the recently-opened sewing studio, waterproofing the wood for the planned backyard garden, and overseeing pulls of two hundred cocktail dresses for yet another shop-'til-you-drop fashion event.

"It's funny," I tell her in the shotgun passenger seat. "Because a lot of people have this misconception that being in fashion and owning your own store is quite glamorous."

"Not for me!" Sullivan proudly announces. "I'm usually away somewhere with a bunch of dirty things that I turn into precious art. If there's an element of glamour, I have yet to tap into it. It's not really my personality anyway, so that works for me."

Herein lies Sullivan's art & commerce: the digging, cleaning and selling of upcycled discarded garments for 69's on-the-floor rolling racks and window displays. As owner of the 69 Vintage empire, she's the "vintage queen" of a now cutthroat niche industry. Whether it's surfing the gentrification wave (the 1100 Queen West flagship location claims coveted pre-Drake Hotel status), or fending off fast fashion copycats (Top Shop buyers have been known to lurk 69 for vintage inspiration in their knock offs), Sullivan has stayed on top thanks to good business practices (stick-to-it-iveness, cautious expansion, and good customer service).

The latter is key, especially in a market not easy to forecast. As customers become turned off by mainstream fashion's sweatshop labour and disposable trends, local vintage provides a carbon footprint-minded cycle of pulled rather than pushed styles determined by a nostalgic zeitgeist.

So vintage's worn appeal -- the perennial hunt for one-of-a-kind -- is today's sustainable Dress For Success fashion formula.

"From Kealan's perspective as a buyer, she really listens to what girls are wearing," explains 69 Vintage Collective's store manager Irene Stickney, who's also  proprietor of the aforementioned Make Den sewing studio that runs classes and PACTFashion, a fashion program for at-risk youth. "So this season is plaid shirts, ankle boots, lots of brocade � she [still] shops with trends in mind."

"But our customers are amazing," adds Stickney, a designer herself who moonlights in local sustainable design collective/bike crew The Deadly Nightshades "They're musicians, journalists, artists -- anybody! Sometimes there are even grandmas who shop in the store [for] the quilts... there's definitely an element of nostalgia that people get into."

"When you're in contact with so many different styles, eras and materials, you start to have an intuition for what hasn't been seen -- what H&M hasn't done, what people aren't wearing on Queen West, what isn't in the fashion magazines," says Sullivan. "And you think, 'you know what? It's been a long time since we've seen this look' -- because the last time we saw really strong shoulder pads was 1987. It's now 2010. Twenty years later, it has to be coming."

So she trend forecasts by testing outrageous designer pieces on the store's floor . Sullivan knows it's a hit when "you start seeing people circulating like hawks around these pieces".

When Sullivan isn't on the daily run of buying stock in New Jersey or from the Church Bazaar lady  (she prides in paying well), she's at the laundromat four days a week, book-ending with Monday and Saturday shifts at the Queen West location where she keeps track of what sold, and what needs to be pulled onto the floor for the next week.

She's candid about the failures prior to 69 -- twice she failed at securing a space in Kensington Market "It definitely wasn't an industry then," she laughs, even though at the time, she needed to take out a loan from her aunt and uncle to start the Queen West location. (She did pay off that loan in full, and a year later, amicably bought out her co-owners at the time, Jesse Girard and Richard Lambert of The Social.

Fashion is known for its risk culture, but Sullivan has bucked that by going with a  community-focused approach to growth.

It was only after testing buy-the-weight items at the Queen West location (not to mention reading the tea leaves on Bloorcourt's future 'hood status), that Sullivan opened the 69 Vintage Buy-The-Pound two years ago, and soon after seeing a community develop moved last December to the present three-floor space in order to share the rent with other independent vintage dealers and foster community growth (hence the Make Den, which came out of customers' desire to get alterations done of their buy-the-pound finds, and now supports the prototyping of an in-house label of reconstructed vintage).

"I always aim to be as thorough as possible in my business," Sullivan says as she dabs Javex on the mold stains of her summer whites in the laundromat. A sign hanging from the ceiling guarantees that these machines are giant loaders, able to wash 5 ½ loads. She has a long way to go, but she's clearly in the early cycle of her digging/cleaning/selling upcycling. "But I don't miss opportunities, and I always work towards genuine results."

Rea McNamara is a Toronto-based writer and columnist.