It was around 7:30 a.m., and Quinn Brown was already at the Goodwill Outlet store outside Portland, Ore. It was a popular spot — there was a line outside every day — and the 19-year-old Mr. Brown wanted to get there before it opened.
Buying cheap thrift-store clothes and reselling them online is Mr. Brown’s full-time job. On this particular January day, Mr. Brown didn’t notice much of interest at first. But then he saw a man holding an old Los Angeles Lakers jacket with the name “Chamberlain” on the back — as in Wilt Chamberlain, the Hall of Fame basketball player.
The man dropped the yellow warm-up jacket back into the bins, and Mr. Brown grabbed it, then bought it for $3.07.
This month, that same jacket sold at a Sotheby’s auction for $89,600.
Chamberlain, who died in 1999, wore the jacket for Game 1 or 2 of the 1972 N.B.A. finals against the Knicks, as well as during the following 1972-73 season — his last before retiring — according to SIA Photo Match, which authenticated the jacket for Sotheby’s. The Lakers beat the Knicks four games to one in the finals, and Chamberlain was the series M.V.P.
For Mr. Brown it was the thrift-store find of a lifetime (his next-most-valuable discovery — a T-shirt featuring the Sub Pop record label that he bought for about $1 — sold for just $250, he said).
In a phone interview this week, Mr. Brown said he initially thought the jacket was a reproduction and might be worth a few hundred dollars. But once he got it home, he realized it might be an original and worth much, much more.
The giveaway, as he told CBS, was its size: The 33-inch-long jacket was far too big for Mr. Brown — almost down to his knees — but perfect for Chamberlain, who was 7-foot-1.
Mr. Brown connected with the Instagram account Bidstitch, which promotes valuable vintage clothing, to give the jacket some visibility. After the jacket was featured on the account, Sotheby’s reached out to Mr. Brown.
The online auction, which ran from July 1 to July 20, attracted 48 bids from 21 bidders, according to Amanda Bass, a Sotheby’s spokeswoman.
The auction house had estimated the jacket would sell for $150,000 to $250,000, and Mr. Brown said he was a little disappointed that it had sold for less. But he was quick to acknowledge his good fortune: “$90,000 is pretty good for a $3 investment,” he said.
(Game-worn jerseys, as opposed to warm-up jackets like the one Mr. Brown found, can sell for much more. The jersey that Chamberlain, considered one of the greatest N.B.A. players ever, wore in Game 2 and 5 of the 1972 finals, for example, sold for $4.9 million in 2023.)
So what will Mr. Brown do with that $90,000? Besides spending some of it on a vacation to Vietnam — which he had planned even before his windfall — it will go into his savings, he said.
Which he can apparently afford to do. Mr. Brown said he had sold over 10,000 items (he declined to disclose his profits) and his expenses are low — he lives with his parents in southwest Portland and does not plan to go to college.
“I’m not in a place where, like, I really need the money,” he said.
Mr. Brown may be one of Portland’s more successful thrifters, but he is certainly not the only one. Mr. Brown, who got into reselling during his junior year of high school (he graduated last year), has 10 close friends who are thrifters, he said, three of whom are going with him to Vietnam. He goes to Goodwill stores about three times a week, he said.
Reselling goods from thrift stores has exploded in the last decade, according to Hayley Platt, a local Goodwill spokeswoman. She said that, on any given day, “a large percentage” of shoppers at the Goodwill store where Mr. Brown found the jacket were young people looking for items to resell.
Ms. Platt said she had no idea how the jacket ended up at the store, one of a handful of outlets in the area known as “Goodwill Bins” for their ubiquitous rows of blue bins piled high with stuff, much of which is sold by the pound. The jacket, which had a dry-cleaning tag affixed to it, was a “mystery,” she said. Hundreds of cars swing by the store every day with donations, she said.
The auction was won by David Kohler, the 64-year-old president of SCP Auctions, which handles auctions of rare sports memorabilia, according to David Randolph, the founder and owner of SIA Photo Match.
Mr. Kohler maintains a vast “Lakers shrine” in his home in Orange County, Calif., as a lifelong fan of the team, he said in a phone interview on Thursday. In all his years of collecting and overseeing auctions, he said, he had never heard of someone stumbling on an item of such value in a thrift store. “That’s what makes this such an incredible story,” he said.
Mr. Brown said he led a “pretty normal life” outside thrifting. He watches sports; he plays recreational games like Spikeball.
But, he said, he couldn’t imagine working a regular job with a set salary, one where giving his all wouldn’t sometimes result in a big payday.
And anyway, thrifting isn’t that hard, he said, and he seems to keep getting better at it: “I just see constant improvement.”
The post A Lakers Jacket, Bought for $3 at Goodwill, Fetches Nearly $90,000 at Auction appeared first on New York Times.
