What We Buy · Vintage Workwear
Sell vintage workwear. The harder the life, the better it aged.
Southern California built things for a hundred years, and the clothes it built them in are now some of the most collectible garments in the world. Chore coats, coveralls, double-knee pants, shop jackets with a name embroidered over the pocket: what a machinist in Long Beach wore until it frayed is exactly what collectors in Tokyo and Paris compete for today. We buy it, in any condition, for cash.
One request before you do anything else: do not wash it. Paint spatter, sun fade, hand-sewn repairs, and grease are not damage in this market, they are the record of a working life, and they are precisely what buyers pay for. A trip through the machine can strip decades of character in forty minutes. Leave everything as you found it and let us look first.
Labels and pieces we pay cash for
Chore coats
blanket-lined Carhartt, Big Mac, and unbranded 1930s-60s coats in duck canvas or denim
Ben Davis and union-made
the gorilla label, plus anything carrying a union-made garment workers tag
Coveralls and shop jackets
Hercules, Sears, and company coveralls with embroidered names and honest grime
Double-knee and painter pants
worn hard, patched, paint-covered pairs from the trades, and older is better
Denim workwear
Levi’s, Lee 91-B jackets, Boss of the Road, and other early work labels
A century of Southern California work
The supply here is unusually deep because the work was unusually varied. Shipyard hands in San Pedro and Long Beach, oil crews on Signal Hill and the Ventura Avenue field, citrus pickers and packinghouse workers from Orange County to the Inland Empire, aerospace machinists in El Segundo and Downey: all of them wore this clothing to death, and their garages and cedar trunks still hold what survived. We make house calls across the whole region from our Laguna Hills warehouse, and workwear often travels with other things worth money, tools, signs, and denim among them. If a parent or grandparent worked with their hands, it is worth letting us open the garage.
Our Word
One phone call is the whole process. A real person answers, we come to you, and you decide with a cash offer in hand.
How it works
Call us.
A real conversation about what you have, no forms, no waiting.
We come to you.
We look at everything, at your pace. We know what we're seeing.
Cash offer, same visit.
A fair price on the spot, or a full estate sale run for you.
Common questions
Should I wash or repair anything before you see it?
No, and please take this seriously. Washing can strip the fading, staining, and stiffness that collectors value most, and a modern repair can cover an original one worth keeping. Bring it out of the garage exactly as it is. Dirty is fine. Dirty is often better.
How do I know if a chore coat is actually old?
Look for a union tag, a buckle-back cinch, donut buttons, or a blanket lining that feels like a saddle pad. But honestly, the fastest way is to text us photos of the label and buttons; we date workwear all day and can usually answer within the hour.
Is a whole trunk of old work clothes worth a visit, or just single pieces?
Either. We price piece by piece, in front of you, explaining what each item brings in the resale markets we sell into. Sometimes one Hercules coat carries the trunk; sometimes the value spreads across twenty modest pieces. The visit is free either way, with no obligation.
Know what it’s worth before you sell.
Our field guides explain how the market actually prices these things. No fishing, no hype: real ranges and the details that move them.
One call. We’ll take it
from there.
(949) 449-1255Mon-Sat 6 am-8 pm · Sun 8 am-5 pm
A real person answers, Monday through Saturday. Photos sent today are usually answered the same day.
Prefer photos? Text them straight to the same number · or send them here
Also from California Vintage Buyers
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- That box of concert tees might be the best thing in the closet.→
- Sell the sign that has been hanging in the garage for forty years.→
- Sell vintage Carhartt to people who know what a union label means.→