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. After the first successful year, she extended her gap for another year to continue to grow her business and learn. 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. She has extensive plans for new directions for Demetra Vintage in the coming years, including the inception of her own design line, Demetra Studio, to run in parallel with Demetra's vintage curation.
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.
