Demetra Vintage was founded in January of 2019 by Sofia Michaelides, an apparel design student at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). She started the business as a way to explore her deep love of antiques and clothing, as well as a way to support herself during a gap year in school. In spring of 2021, she went back to school while continuing to run Demetra Vintage as she pursued her degree, and graduated with a BFA in apparel design in Spring 2022.

In the years since its inception, Demetra has become more than just a vintage shop, but rather the culmination of years of learning and developing skills in the art of garment construction, restoration and history. Through years of careful experimentation, our founder has developed methods of cleaning, restoring, and otherwise revitalizing antique garments from decades past to bring old world beauty to today, and give these artifacts new life. At Demetra, every single item that we offer in our shop goes through many rounds of restoration, always beginning with thorough cleaning and ending with a fully restored, ready to wear garment. Through this process, we are able to weed out the pieces that are not strong enough to stand the test of time to make sure that we are only delivering the very best quality of garments to our customers. We do things the hard way so you don't have to. All of our restoration and alteration work is done in house by our small team in our Providence Rhode Island atelier and showroom.

Demetra Vintage is named after Sofia'a great grandmother Demetra (Δήμητρα in Greek), which is also Sofia's middle name. Sofia never met her great grandmother, but she has heard a lifetime's worth of stories about the courageous young woman who traveled to China from Greece at the age of 21 to marry a man she had never met. Sofia's Grandmother Maria was the youngest of 5 of Demetra's children, and lived in Tien Tsin, China until the age of 6, when her family moved back to Greece preceding WWII. The photo of the young girl on her bicycle that serves as the Demetra Vintage logo is a photo of Maria in Tien Tsin in 1934 at the age of 4.