From garage start-up to national home decor winner

Lori Kaye Lodes

Contributor

August 24, 2026

RIPON – From a garage office in Ripon to Disney collaborations and a national home decor award, Founder Sarah Willett said Patina Vie has built a lifestyle brand where history, design and experience collide.

Willett said that experience recently earned the boutique a distinction that puts a national exclamation point on what she has spent more than a decade building.

Patina Vie was recently named the 2026 Best Independent Home Decor Store in the Nation through the 75th Annual Retailer Excellence Awards, which Willett said, for her, was both unexpected and deeply meaningful.

At first, she said she didn’t know Patina Vie was being considered for the award.

But once it cleared an initial tier of independent home decor retailers, Willett said she was invited to an interview.

She said she later learned the company was among the top three and that someone from Patina Vie needed to attend the awards ceremony in Dallas to be considered for the honor.

However, Willett said she wasn’t convinced she could go.

“We needed to be present in Dallas for an award ceremony with 500-600 attendees and all the home furnishings and home decor manufacturers,” she said. “I said to my daughter, ‘We’re too busy with summer,’ and she said, ‘We run at Mach 10 all the time – what if we won? Wouldn’t that be something? Let’s go.’”

Willett said the turnout was everything she anticipated, bringing together the industry that “basically raised me.”

She said she was stunned when Patina Vie was announced as the award recipient. 

Humble beginnings

The path to Patina Vie’s national recognition, Willett said, started in a much smaller setting: her garage in Ripon.

About 12 years ago, Willett – who has a background in design and product development – said she set out to create a lifestyle brand around her own aesthetic.

“My goal was to work toward sharing my version of lifestyle through products,” she said. “To do that, I needed to find talented people locally and then globally to help me design these goods and manufacture them.”

Willett said it started with four women in a loft above her home garage, a few phone lines and places to plug in laptops.

She said the company’s early years were fueled in part by another of her longtime passions: antiques.

Willett said her interest in antiques dates back to when she worked in an antique shop at age 12, developing an appreciation for craftsmanship and the quality of older objects.

When she later needed a way to generate cash flow while building Patina Vie’s larger business model, she said she turned to Etsy. 

Willett said she sourced antiques and vintage pieces from Midwestern flea markets and estate sales, then cleaned, photographed and sold them to customers around the world. 

“I had a love for antiques and vintage my whole life, and the Etsy shop allowed us to keep cash flowing those first few years while reaching customers globally,” she said. “We were shipping antiques to New Zealand, Dubai, Italy – it was marvelous.”

Among the antiques she was selling, Willett said vintage midcentury cocktail glasses quickly emerged as a favorite.

She said she bought them aggressively, but demand soon outpaced the supply of the “Mad Men”-style cocktailware.

Willett said she responded by designing and manufacturing her own.

“The obvious next stop was to find a manufacturer to [create] our beautiful cocktail glasses, and we did,” she said. “It’s still our No. 1 category after all these years.”

Manufacturing the future

Willett said that transition, from finding beautiful things to designing and manufacturing them, became fundamental to Patina Vie.

Today, she said about 70% of Patina Vie’s business is design and manufacturing, while the remaining 30% is direct-to-consumer retail.

And Willett said the storefront is only one piece of the company.

Patina Vie works with manufacturers in roughly a dozen countries, she said, depending on the materials involved – including textiles from India, wood from Indonesia, porcelain from the Far East and earthenware from Portugal.

Four of the company’s 12 employees today, Willett said, are designers and technical artists who create designs and manufacturing files.

She said Patina Vie also works on collaborations, licensing agreements and wholesale partnerships.

Its products, Willett said, include housewares and tabletop items such as plates, glassware and drinkware, along with soft-home collections including quilts, comforters and throw blankets sold through national retailers.

She said the business has retained a vertical approach that allows her to remain involved throughout the process.

“We try to touch every facet of distribution, [including] end consumers,” she said. “I’m old enough to realize when I leave the experience of the lifestyle in someone else’s hands, it’s watered down. So, I aim to be as present and involved in every tier [of the business] that I can.”

Willett said the company’s national reach expanded dramatically after she refused to take no for an answer from Anthropologie.

She said she traveled to Philadelphia three times to pitch to the retailer, a relationship that helped expose Patina Vie to a much larger audience.

Then, Willett said, came an unexpected call from the princess division of Walt Disney, which had seen Patina Vie’s 18-karat glassware and wanted to speak with the company’s owner. 

“They asked if Patina Vie wanted to do a collaboration,” she said. “It was a goosebump kind of day.”

Willett said Patina Vie eventually completed four collaborations with Disney companies, including products connected to “Beauty and the Beast,” “Aladdin” and “Coco.”

She said the collaboration opened another door for Patina Vie.

When Disney decided the products were too expensive for traditional novelty stores, Willett said she approached her contacts at Anthropologie – which bought the collection and launched Patina Vie for Disney in its stores and online.

She said the products sold out in two weeks.

Willett said the exposure also helped propel Patina Vie’s direct-to-consumer business, including its website and, more recently, a return to Etsy.

The flagship storefront is the heart

Even though she deeply appreciates the collaborations, licensing agreements and wholesale partnerships, Willett said the physical store – which opened in the summer of 2018 – remains at the center of her vision.

Growing up in nearby Green Lake, she said she was familiar with Ripon’s Main Street, with its historic architecture and older buildings.

And though she wasn’t initially looking to become a retailer, Willett said she was drawn to the potential of a particular building.

“There was a really charming building that needed some life breathed back into her, and I was just a little bewitched by the potential of what it could be,” she said. “It’s my favorite layer of our business, the tangible front door to our brand and lifestyle.”

Willett said the company now owns the entire three-story building at 205 Watson St., Ripon.

The ground floor, she said, houses the retail experience, while the basement contains a commercial kitchen supporting the sipping room, where charcuterie, Bavarian pretzels, cookies and flatbreads can be prepared.

Willett said two floors above the retail space serve as offices and photography areas.

The building’s history, she said, is part of the experience, too.

Built-ins in the sipping room, Willett said, once served as the backdrop for Ripon’s tobacco shop, where cigars and tins of tobacco were displayed.

Today, she said those same features hold what she refers to as Patina Vie’s curiosities and treasures “layered in our fashionable style.”

Willett said that’s a theme seen, felt, smelled and experienced throughout the storefront, extending into the sipping room that was an entrepreneurial experiment.

When the neighboring space became available, Willett said she removed the wall and expanded Patina Vie’s footprint, building a bar, obtaining bartending licenses and making preparations to serve cocktails using the store’s own glassware.

Now, she said customers can settle in for a drink while they shop.

“We designed this gorgeous glassware and thought, wouldn’t it be cool – and those are expensive words – to have a charming little bar inside Patina Vie?” she said. “And that’s what we have, only using our 18-karat gold glassware for wine, Old Fashioneds and other luxury cocktails that we have with fun names.”

Depending on the season, Willett said they can also order a craft cocktail, grab ice cream or pick up a gourmet dessert from a 1964 Airstream parked outside.

“[We have] shiny bits and tumbled and imperfect bits, and it’s all been gathered and curated in a way that only we do, and hopefully feels comfortable and authentic and special,” she said.

Willett said Patina Vie has grown beyond traditional retail, creating a space where shopping is as much about the experience as the merchandise.

Luxury made accessible

Willett said the company’s products reflect the philosophy of blending beauty with function and history with something new.

Patina Vie’s porcelain tidbit bowls, for example, she said, have long been popular collectibles. 

More recently, Willett said the company began pouring luxury candles into those bowls and its own 18-karat patterned glassware.

The result, she said, is both a candle and a keepsake featuring high-quality wax, cotton wicks and a dose of style.

Willett said the Patina Vie team describes the candles as “pretty enough to leave out, lovely enough to give.”

That philosophy, she said, is an apt description of the company as a whole: taking something of value, whether a historic building or a vintage item, and giving it another life – a philosophy readily visible in the downtown flagship, which has become a destination for visitors from beyond Ripon. 

“Part of our success is how charming our little downtown Main Street corridor is,” she said. “It’s a destination where people can come, have a meal and browse several charming storefronts. I’m so grateful to be part of a community.”

Willett said for her, that relationship with the community became especially clear during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the physical store closed.

She said the local community continued supporting the business through online orders and pickups, helping sustain the company during an uncertain period.

“The old adage is that it takes a village, and our local community kept us alive,” she said.

Willett said that local foundation now supports a customer base that stretches across the country, with shipped orders still carrying a personal touch.

She said her team sends roughly 40-50 packages a day, each with a handwritten note from her – a time-consuming detail she considers important. 

“That’s just what we do,” she said. “We will not stray from [our business] model. It allows us to continue each day to do what we do.”

Willett said that attention to detail may also help explain why the national award resonated so deeply.

She said she describes the store as a form of theater, where sidewalks are scrubbed each morning, flowers are maintained and products are carefully arranged.

Willett said the goal is not simply to sell something but to create a temporary escape – something people are seeking more and more today.

“I think we all crave escapism and comfort, a chance to live and experience something real,” she said. “That’s why we love the movies or seeing a performance. We all want to feel something special, and the retail experience we provide is not a traditional one. As I say to my team every day, ‘We’re putting on theater for people.’”

Willett said that may be the simplest explanation for Patina Vie’s success.

She said the company is built on beautiful things, but beauty alone isn’t the product, but rather the multilayered combination of items positioned to provide an adventure and a feeling.

Willett said one of the greatest compliments comes from customers who walk through the door and don’t want to leave.

“The best compliment I get from people who come in is that they don’t want to leave, that it’s their new happy place,” she said. “I don’t think there’s a greater accolade for our team than when people feel it with us.”

For further details on Patina Vie, head to patinavie.com.