How did Thrifty Beaches become a SLO sensation? Behind secondhand brand’s success

Before becoming a household name on the Central Coast for secondhand items and his risky-but-successful business ventures, Adam Kemp grew up surrounded by blank, white walls.

As he and his family moved around to various California cities, Kemp dreamed of a very different sort of future.

“I just spent so much of my time just visualizing the life I want to have and visualizing the things I want to do,” he said. “I was only 7, but I knew that when I got older, I would be able to create the life I want, but also do something impactful.”

Today, he’s well on his way, as the bare walls of his childhood have been replaced by an eclectic array of vintage clothing, accessories and furniture at his astoundingly popular Thrifty Beaches locations.

“I feel really proud, but sometimes it almost doesn’t feel like I did it,” the 25-year-old told The Tribune in a recent interview. “It’s weird. Even though I am the person that did this, it’s just weird.”

“I’ve always felt led and directed toward something,” he continued. “So I think sometimes when you have that thing that you’re being pulled to, you don’t feel like there’s any way you could not be pulled toward it.”

Not even a year and a half after founding its first location in downtown SLO, Thrifty Beaches has become an overnight sensation and multi-million dollar secondhand and vintage business.

As of Monday, the business has over 99,200 followers on Instagram, with featured videos of Kemp reselling pre-loved clothing items, accessories and the much-anticipated announcements of a new store or venture seeming to come at every turn.

The business wunderkind is stopping at nothing to build a secondhand clothing empire.

“I tell people all the time, I want this to be a global brand,” he said. “I feel like our lifespans are so short — not to be morbid — but I dream big, and that’s why I’m moving so fast because I know realistically what I want to do, for me to do it in my lifetime is probably not possible.”

Thrifty Beaches co-founder said he always wanted to be a billionaire

Living in Temecula, Irvine and Tustin, the lack of furniture in barren apartment buildings grew Kemp’s imagination.

Kemp’s mother, who battled mental illness, took Kemp and his older siblings Jordan and Mercedes from Minnesota to various towns in California, separating them from their father, Leroy Kemp.

In those early years, Kemp would tell the people around him that he would be a billionaire once he grew up. No one believed him — they all told him to “be realistic.”

He worked odd jobs throughout his teenage years to help pay the rent.

Once reunited with his father in 2010 in Chicago, Kemp was introduced to wrestling — albeit reluctantly. As a three-time world champion wrestler himself, Leroy Kemp used the sport to bond with his son after years of separation.

“I wanted him to do the sport that I had all this legacy in,” Leroy Kemp told The Tribune. “I wanted him to experience it and I wanted to be that wrestling dad that I got to see so many other of my friends who were coaches coach their sons. So I just kept pushing it.”

Kemp started wrestling in seventh grade in 2014, motivated by money, he said. When Kemp first agreed to wrestle, Leroy Kemp gave him $50 right off the bat.

After winning the junior high conference for two years in a row, Kemp was feeling confident to keep wrestling, but the nerves of having a famous father in the wrestling world overpowered his desire to try out for the high school team.

“I was trying to work up the courage to be able to take that pressure and that criticism from people and have people talk about you and hold certain standards in their head because of who your dad is,” Kemp said.

Another $50 sweetened the deal — although Kemp said the money was no longer a priority for him, and he continued wrestling at William Fremd High School in Palatine, Illinois, in mid-2015.

That was when Kemp met his girlfriend and future business partner, Maria Trott.

On their first date at the movies, Kemp echoed his childhood refrain: He told her he wanted to be a billionaire.

To hear Trott tell it, she at first assumed this was just a case of “another person saying this.”

“I was like, ‘So why do you think you’re going to be a billionaire?’” Trott told The Tribune during a recent interview. “He goes, ‘I just know it. I just know it.’”

Though how exactly he might achieve that wasn’t immediately clear, it wouldn’t be long until Kemp would take his first steps down the path to business success.

‘The only way to do it.’ How SLO secondhand business got its start

In 2017, Kemp’s first reselling experience was drawn out of necessity.

Rent was due, and Kemp rifled through his father’s closet to find something to flip to make the deadline.

He pulled out a custom-made Clint Orms belt, remembering how when his father first showed it to him, he said it was an expensive belt.

Kemp sold it for $1,560, enough to get by another month.

“I was the type of kid that would be like pulling a lawn mower behind me, just going door-to-door, asking to cut people’s lawns,” Kemp said. “I did that so many times, but never using eBay to flip something. That was just a back-against-the-wall situation to where we needed a lot of money, and that was the only way to do it.”

Kemp and Trott graduated from high school in 2018, and while Kemp went off to Fresno State with a wrestling scholarship, Trott moved to San Francisco, worked in coffee shops and grew a YouTube channel following.

Once Fresno State’s wrestling program got cut in 2020, Kemp transferred to Cal Poly and moved in with Trott, who also relocated to San Luis Obispo.

There, he majored in communications and entered the university’s MBA program in 2024, writing a letter to the school that he would make a great alumnus, following the “billionaire” game.

“I can always see the silver lining, and it was my harsh childhood that allowed me to dream big,” he wrote to the school. “The room was a blank canvas that I painted with ideas every single day.”

After Kemp and Trott moved in together, they searched for furniture at the Goodwill Outlet — popularly known as “the bins” — to furnish their place.

Walking into the store in 2021 and seeing top resellers aggressively grab items knowing their real price, Kemp called them “thrifty bitches,” lining up the now-iconic tongue-in-cheek name for his store.

Six Broyhill Basilia dining chairs were Kemp’s first furniture flip, reselling them for $600 when they were worth thousands of dollars.

That was the first-ever Thrifty Beaches Instagram post.

“It all just started off of having an eye, and it’s something that’s kind of innate,” Kemp said. “You can’t teach having an eye, it’s something that’s a mix of curiosity and vision for something.”

While furniture was taking Goodwill by storm four years ago, the vintage chairs, tables and antique goods quickly dwindled, and Kemp and Trott had to make a move. They officially switched to clothing in 2023.

Kemp would set up on Dexter Lawn on Cal Poly’s campus and sell secondhand clothes specially curated for students.

In just a few months, his secondhand business soared, but it was taxing for the couple to lug pounds of clothing every day to pop-ups, markets and homes.

“We were always in this state of unsteadiness and the unknown, like, what is this really doing?” Trott said.

“When I’m stressed out, I go scroll on Zillow and Craigslist,” she continued. “I don’t know why, I just like the hunt. Then, sure enough, I found our first location.”

Trott spotted 1019 Broad St. in mid-February of 2024, two minutes after the space went live on Craigslist. The couple toured the location the next day and were approved two hours after visiting the spot.

Thrifty Beaches found its home for the next seven months, a spot where eager customers routinely lined up down the street, clamoring to get a look inside the 4,480-square-foot-store even in spite of the often sweltering temperatures inside the small space as the weather warmed.

Yet, Kemp had an itch, an itch that grew every time he would walk past the huge vacant spot on Higuera Street that formerly housed Beverly Fabrics & Crafts.

He would sit in his car, windows rolled down, and listen to the people walk by the downtown store’s empty spot.

“They would say, ‘Why does SLO allow this place to be empty? This is so ugly for the city.’” he said. “‘Someone should do something with this,’ and it was really cool to hear all people’s wild ideas, like people said people should throw raves in there. Granted, nobody said it should be a vintage store.”

With $4,890 to his name, Kemp took out loans to lease 876 Higuera St., now the beloved Thrifty Beaches headquarters.

Not even a year later, the store expanded again to Santa Barbara, and once again to take over the old Ross building next door to its downtown counterpart. According to Kemp, the business has quickly turned into a multi-million dollar operation — securing enough capital to continuously expand.

Amid that explosive growth, there have been a fair share of raised eyebrows and headshaking at what on its surface can seem like much too much, much too fast.

“Of course, some certain groups who say ‘You got lucky and this and that and everything,’ but Adam isn’t lucky,” Leroy Kemp said. “I mean, he’s doing this again and again and again. He’s got three stores now.”

Some might say some of that fearlessness — Kemp’s unique ability to jump in whole-heartedly into his ventures even in the face of doubters — comes from that childhood of bare walls.

“My version of visualization is different in the way that it’s real, and it’s already happened, it just hasn’t happened yet,” Kemp said, fiddling with a loose thread at the headquarters’ sewing table in SLO. “I feel comfortable in white wall spaces, or empty spaces, empty buildings, because of what it could be, and I know what I could do with it, and it doesn’t feel intimidating.”

What’s next for Thrifty Beaches?

As with any good rags-to-riches story, it’s not been easy.

Working as a Cal Poly graduate student, wrestler and Thrifty Beaches owner took its toll, and Kemp left the MBA program two quarters before his graduation.

What makes up for it, he said, is Thrifty Beaches being voted Class of 2025 Best of SLO County by New Times.

“I went to the New Times office, took photos like I was graduating,” he said. “It’s kind of interesting, I still got a Class of 2025 award — differently.”

Today, Kemp rides his Onewheel skateboard across the waxed wooden floors of Thrifty Beaches Headquarters, gliding between racks of vintage Levis denim, worn leather jackets and one-of-a-kind T-shirts.

Some days he can be found there making deals with people who drive from as far away as Dallas, Chicago and Colorado to try to sell him goods.

Once or twice a week, he’ll make the trip down to Santa Barbara, building the store’s reputation along State Street, which has been closed to car traffic since 2020 and has eroded the vibrancy of a historically thriving downtown area, Kemp said.

Other times he’s in the newest Thrifty Beaches next door to the SLO headquarters, buying vintage and secondhand clothing and accessories. Meanwhile, Trott is also working the shops — buying “bread and butter” items and working on payroll and scheduling.

Even though the business is still young, Kemp isn’t eager to stay still for long.

“I see a lot of aspects of life as a big illusion, like we have this illusion that we have something to lose,” he said. “When you talk about money, it’s like, I’ve spent my whole life being broke, so if I go back to not having money, so what?”

In what’s fast becoming his signature, Kemp’s idea for the next stage of his growing empire is well outside the box.

Kemp said he is now looking toward health and wellness ventures, such as local farming and sustainability, and he wants to open a grocery store or a coffee shop.

That might include even incorporating the Thrifty Beaches Headquarters space with groceries.

“It’d be the first of its kind, I think,” he said. “When I eat healthy, and I eat stuff that I feel is good for me, I feel better, and I’ve heard that people who shop here, they feel like they’re doing something better for the planet. Those two things combined would be kind of a cool thing.”

While extravagant ideas and big business moves like a local market and sustainable coffee are right up his alley, Kemp said he’s mainly focused on fully opening his third Thrifty Beaches location at 868 Higuera St. after some difficulty with landlords.

“It’s like a sink or swim all on you, and we’re going to do something really cool there, and it’s going to be great, but we’re going to do it mainly on our own without much help,” he said.

Despite the challenges in securing the place, Kemp said he is planning to open the shop by the end of October, and he teases the possibilities of going outside secondhand clothing, and doing something “completely different.”

“I love design, I love art and stuff like that,” he said. “The store will deal heavily in that space for people where fashion is one thing, but design and form, function, oddities, rarities and just wacky, random stuff — that is where I want to go next, and the store will speak to that.”

As he keeps growing what he hopes will someday soon be a national brand, Kemp often thinks back to where he all started in California’s Central Valley.

Just over five years ago, Kemp was completing a Doordash delivery order in Fresno, scraping by to make ends meet. On a particularly difficult day, he wrote a message for himself in his Notes app.

“I won’t die in the valley until I see the top of the mountain,” it read, from Oct. 14, 2020.

“When that hit me, that was the pivotal moment of my entire life, just getting that word and also trying to understand it, because in my head, I don’t feel like I can change my future, my destiny too much,” he said. “It’s good to know, just be smart in certain situations and be humble and don’t take anything for granted, because everything could change in an instant.”

While the desire to be a billionaire may have motivated Kemp in the past, the opposite is now the case for the business wunderkind.

“As an adult I strive to make a difference in my community and hopefully one day the world,” he said.

Today, Kemp sees the top of the mountain — or more accurately, Bishop Peak — every day while traveling to the Thrifty Beaches headquarters downtown.

“When I’m walking around, that’s really when I get to see the impact of this place,” he said. “I had to go out and find something, or someone brought something in, I priced it, and then someone else bought it. It transcends life.”

This story was originally published November 2, 2025 at 10:00 AM.