The box was sitting on top of a wardrobe in his mother's childhood bedroom, pushed so far back that nobody had touched it in thirty years. Devon Okafor found it the weekend of his mother's birthday in May 2020, two months into a pandemic that had ended his career as a sous chef and taken, temporarily at least, most of what he thought his life was going to look like. The box was taped shut. On the side, in black marker: DO NOT THROW AWAY.
Inside were his grandmother's clothes. Not all of them, not a wardrobe's worth, but the good ones, the special ones, the ones she had decided were worth keeping even when keeping things was hard. A halter top in a burnt orange that had never made sense in any decade except the one it was made for. A suede jacket, brown, with fringe down both arms, that Okafor held up to the light for a long time before he said anything. "I remember this," he says now. "I remember her in this. And I thought, someone needs to know this jacket existed."
That thought, that specific and seemingly small thought, is how Relic began.
By the summer of 2020, Okafor had photographed everything in the box, posted the photos on Instagram, and sold four pieces in the first week. By fall he was sourcing from estate sales in the neighborhood, every Saturday morning, sometimes with a line waiting outside before anyone had finished their coffee. By December he had signed a lease on a small space on Haight Street, two blocks from where Janis Joplin used to live. He named it Relic.
"I had no idea what I was doing," he says. "I didn't know about seller's permits, I didn't know about insurance, I didn't know anything. I just knew that I'd found something real, and I was terrified someone else was going to find it before I figured out how to build something around it."
He figured it out. In the four years since, Relic has become something quietly known in the San Francisco vintage community, the kind of shop that dealers mention to other dealers, that gets word-of-mouth referrals from people who stumbled in once and thought about the green 1970s denim shirt they didn't buy for six months afterward. Okafor specializes in California vintage from 1965 to 1985, with a particular focus on pieces that tell a San Francisco story, concert merchandise, protest buttons, clothing from neighborhoods that no longer look the way they did when the clothes were made.
This is how he talks about every piece in the shop. Not like a salesperson. Like a curator who has been entrusted with something and takes the responsibility seriously. He will spend twenty minutes explaining the provenance of a single jacket if you let him, and you usually let him, because he's not performing knowledge, he actually has it, built up through four years of relentless self-education, estate sale mornings, late-night reading, and the kind of focused attention to a subject that replaces formal training when you care enough.
The restaurant world prepared him for this more than he expected. "Cooking is about provenance," he says. "Where does this ingredient come from? What are its properties? How does it behave? You develop this instinct for quality and for authenticity that turns out to be completely transferable." He learned fabric the way he learned to cook, by handling things obsessively until the knowledge became physical, until his hands could tell the difference between a pre-1975 garment and something that came later without needing to look at the label.
He's wrong sometimes. He'll tell you that himself. "I've paid too much for things and sold them too cheap and completely misread the market on specific categories. I still do. But I've gotten better faster than I had any right to expect, and I think the honest answer is that I love it in a way that makes learning feel easy."
There is something deliberate about Okafor having landed in the Haight specifically. He grew up in Oakland, moved to San Francisco for culinary school at eighteen, and lived in the Mission for most of his twenties. When he was looking for space, he looked everywhere. He signed in the Haight because the neighborhood felt like an obligation.
"The Haight is where the Summer of Love happened. That's not a tourism brochure. That's a real thing that happened in these streets, and those clothes are primary sources. When someone walks out of here with one of them, they're not just buying a shirt. They're agreeing to take care of something that matters."
He pauses on that. "I know that sounds heavy for a vintage shop. But I think if you don't feel that weight at least a little, you're probably in the wrong business. Or at least a different business than me."
Four years in, there are things Okafor would tell an earlier version of himself. Get the seller's permit before you sell anything, not after. Price your knowledge, not just your inventory, because the knowledge is what people are actually paying for. Build relationships with estate sale companies before you need them, because by the time you need them it's too late to start. Don't try to sell everything to everyone, because the people who need exactly what you have will find you if you are specific enough.
He would also tell himself to slow down in the early days, to resist the impulse to move everything quickly and instead to live with pieces long enough to understand them. "Some of the best things I've sold, I kept for a year before I priced them. You learn something from that. You learn what the object is actually worth when you're not in a hurry."
The halter top and the suede jacket are still in the shop. The halter top is not for sale. The jacket is, technically, available, but Okafor has not put a price on it. When asked why, he looks at it for a moment. "I'll know when it's time," he says. "And it has to be the right person."
His grandmother would understand.