On January 21, 2026, Bandit MKE, a vintage clothing shop in Milwaukee’s historic Brady Street neighborhood, suffered a catastrophic and irreplaceable loss of inventory during a massive five-alarm fire at the U-Haul storage facility in Walker’s Point. Bandit MKE has five, 10x10 storage units in the facility, where we keep thousands of special occasion items, online inventory, off-season stock, fur and leather coats, vintage shoes, and so much more. If you’ve ever shopped our collection of rare vintage band and concert tees at Summerfest, all of them are stored in this facility. If you’ve ever shopped an Overstock Sale on the sidewalk outside our store, all that inventory is in this facility. Every single piece of spring and summer inventory we expected to fill our shop with in March is in this facility. Our sister website, Bolted Vintage, where we sell vintage footwear, all 850 pairs of active inventory are stored in this facility. We are at this facility every single day - staging vintage booths for markets, pulling sold online inventory, photographing merchandise, organizing buys, and just generally doing the behind-the-scenes work of owning a small business. The retail value of the things stored there is well into the six-figures.
In short, we’re devastated.
In addition to the fire, 2025 was our worst revenue year on record since we opened in 2021. The worst months for sales we’ve ever had were November 2025, then December 2025; now in January 2026, we’ve made less than half of what we made in November. The shop supports two owners who rely entirely on Bandit MKE for their income, as well as three part-time employees. All of our futures feel so uncertain.
Right now, we need funds to keep the lights on and the doors open in the shop. We’ll need to figure out how to run our business inside of an entirely new workflow, with nowhere to put things. We’ll need to source more inventory to stock the shop for spring and summer. We’ll need to source inventory to sell online. We’ll need to source inventory for festivals and markets like Summerfest. We’ll need a place to put it all. We may need to stage a recovery and restoration operation, if anything even remains. All we know we have is what is currently on hangers in the shop at this very moment. Everything else is a big scary unknown.