This rare Black-owned secondhand shop is expanding from online-only to a new Germantown location

Signing the lease, Tomarra Sankara-Kilombo says, was a leap of religion. The new store for Sankara-Kilombo’s shop, Black Soul Classic, slated to open in May perhaps, will be in Germantown, her community.

Black Soul Vintage has operated as on-line-only for a few a long time, marketing classic clothes, residence items, artwork, ephemera, and loads of textbooks. Several of her finds are scarce. For illustration, a tiny a lot more than a 7 days in the past, she additional a amount of vintage issues of Sports activities Illustrated, like a 1983 version with Dr. J on the include from the Sixers’ NBA championship-winning time. But Black Soul Classic is a exceptional obtain in and of itself, as lots of of Philadelphia’s classic outlets are not Black-owned. Sankara-Kilombo is looking ahead to seeing persons encountering her store in particular person.

“[To] make it more personal so that persons can touch and come to feel and see all the diverse pieces that I have, and really experience the vibration of what Black Soul is,” she said. “I constantly say Black is a experience. And so I want persons to be equipped to feel what I’m accomplishing.”

She released a GoFundMe as Black Soul Vintage’s setting up fund before this month, looking for support to complete renovations in the quickly-to-open up location at 90 Church Lane. Sankara-Kilombo, also a collage artist who studied vogue layout at Drexel College, is at present painting the area just after acquiring do the job accomplished on the ceiling.

Lengthy right before she opened Black Soul Classic, Sankara-Kilombo was the child who followed her mom in thrift outlets and in no way misplaced the routine, increasing into the adult who people today would ask, “Where’d you get that?”

“Eventually it turned into ‘You can promote this things,’” she defined, now 31 decades old with hundreds of classic goods in her property. Quite a few have appear from donations, often even from strangers. What she finds and what arrives her way for her is “spirit get the job done.”

“I swear to you items just pop up,” said Sankara-Kilombo, who just lately occurred upon a signed duplicate of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. (She’s surely trying to keep that one particular.) “I’m never ever necessarily hunting for everything in certain. … There’ll just be something there.”

The Inquirer spoke to Sankara-Kilombo about her technique and her eyesight. This dialogue has been edited for length.

I have constantly liked historical past — when I was small I required to be an archaeologist. I normally have cherished digging and discovering and looking through and producing. So that was the range 1 thing that I was actually hoping that people would get out of Black Soul is the publications that is my main aim. But I commenced to insert the other issues due to the fact those were being things that I actually appreciated.

I at first required to operate in the vogue field. So garments was constantly likely to be a thing that was a part of what I was executing. So then the household products variety of rolled into that. Black Soul is actually a lifestyle.

You wander into Goodwill, you walk into a thrift store from anywhere, it’s routinely white. The garments are white, the textbooks that are there are white, almost everything is white-centric, without having even contemplating about it. So I was like, what if we had that same place, but Black was at the center?

So that is why I like to gather a small bit of all the things. So it can fill all the various spaces in your life.

Oh my gosh, female, I wish I understood. I was going via some books. If you can see, I phone it my space in which I maintain everything, it’s basically bursting at the seams. So the store has appear ideal on time. And I was like, you know what, I have to go through every single box.

So I have boxed almost everything up a handful of months ago, and in the past several months considering that we’re getting prepared for the shop, I have been actually just pulling out every single box and heading by way of what I place in there. So that Beloved in particular, I genuinely simply cannot remember the place it arrived from. It did not have a price tag on it. So I’m assuming that it probably arrived from a donation, and not a thing that I purchased myself.

And so which is why I inform individuals it is quite spiritual. I know at times we’re like, “That’s a minimal, you know, out there,” but I definitely do feel that spirit places sure items in my hands.

I opened it up. And I was like, I was like: It is signed! With a genuine ink pen! It’s hers! That implies she held the e-book. So I’m like screaming upstairs.

She’s my favourite author. She’s also from Ohio. And so it just really, definitely meant a good deal.

I am so energized for the actual physical room because I have so a lot of big plans for it. And I truly want it to be a community place exactly where individuals can appear and master. I’m definitely hoping to be in a position to host unique workshops and situations and matters like that, all during the summertime and all in the course of the year. And I’ve been in talks with rather a few men and women about accomplishing unique panels and various points like that. I actually want to make a cultural hub.

I want it to be somewhere the place you can appear and get a course with a local professor or you can occur and do a collage workshop, where by you can appear and have a wellness occasion in Black Soul. So I seriously needed to encompass all of individuals items. And I truly want us to be able to vacation. I want Black Soul to be obvious in different places. Whether which is a pop-up or far, significantly in the upcoming, yet another retailer or some thing like that. Which is definitely where I see Black Soul headed.