Chugwater is not the place where most people would expect to find high fashion.
But that is exactly what they’ll find along the tiny town’s main drag — a new vintage Western clothing shop, run by a woman with roots in the high-powered fashion worlds of Italy and New York.
In a town better known for its annual chili cook-off than haute couture, the BB West Vintage boutique joins a growing number of historic buildings turned destination businesses pulling tourists off Interstate 25 and keeping a rural main street alive.
Claudia Borchardt is her name, and she’s married to a Wyoming rancher just outside of Chugwater. But her fashion story starts a world away.
The Beginning Of A Dream
At first, Claudia didn’t dare dream of starting a clothing store about as far off the beaten path as a person can get — in a town of less than 200 people in the least-populated state in the U.S.
She’d owned a boutique in Brooklyn, New York, and knew just how difficult retail could be, even in a more populous community.
“When I moved here, my career obviously didn’t exist,” she said.
That had her asking herself what kind of work she could do from home to keep the creative muscles working and feel more a part of the community.
She tried a few things. First, she leaned into her marketing experience, working with The Historic Plains Hotel in Cheyenne to sell tourist packages and such.
But there’s just something about the fashion industry that refuses to be quiet in her head.
“So, about eight years ago I started an Etsy business,” she said. “And I was selling vintage Western wear — kids and adults — and it really took off. I found that there’s a market for what we take for granted, for what everyone probably already has in their closet from grandma.”
Turns out, people in big cities and even other countries just love Western fashion, especially now with popular television shows like Taylor Sheridan’s “Yellowstone”.
“So I started online and I’ve been working out of my house for eight years, growing and growing,” she said.
Before long, dozens of orders were shipping to customers across the country and even overseas, all from a basement in rural Platte County.
One day the growing towers of totes in the basement could no longer escape the notice of her husband.
“Whoa,” he said. “You have so much stuff, you could open a store.”
And so, that’s just what she decided to do, right there in tiny Chugwater, population 175.
“I was just getting tired of having to go to the basement every time I had a sale,” Borchardt admitted. “And I was wishing I could just hang it all up and work with it a little more.”
Following The Lead
For Chugwater, BB West means one more cute shop on a slowly but surely growing main drag. It’s something else to help draw tourists off Interstate 25, too, bringing new dollars into a town that would otherwise go the way of so many other small communities.
Borchardt found good role models in Chugwater’s Tri-County Mercantile owner Josh Hopkins, Soda Fountain owner Jill Winger, and Stampede owners Lily and Lance Nilson.
All have bought distressed properties and/or businesses to revive them and found ways to succeed in spite of the lack of population. Their efforts have injected new vitality into the community, to keep the town from dying out altogether, while also helping preserve pieces of Wyoming history.
The Soda Fountain, for example, is the state’s oldest operating soda fountain. It opened in 1914, and still serves old-fashioned malts.
Winger initially thought her path to viability was to keep things simple, so she leaned into a burger and malt concept. That was popular, and drew people from all over the state for ranch-raised burgers and a huge selection of flavored malts.
But real success didn’t come until she leaned further into her true vision for the place — fancy dinners.
Now she has a supper club experience every month or so she calls Supper at the Fountain, which has been selling out regularly and drawing people from Cheyenne and beyond.
“We all just want the town to have more,” Borchardt said. “We want to kind of collaborate together and make it so when you come to town, there’s more things to do than just grab a milkshake.”
So Borchardt will be working in tandem with Winger for the next Supper at the Fountain, set for July 17 and 18.
“She has two seatings, and sometimes people are trickling out the door or waiting on the sidewalk, because that’s a small space,” Borchardt said. “So I said, ‘What if I open and we collaborate and you send people over as they’re waiting for their table?’”
It was the perfect solution to support both businesses in creating an experience that can draw people into Chugwater not just once, but over and over.
“There’s also a rodeo on Saturday,” Borchardt added. “So obviously, I’m going to be open then, too, because there are going to be people, and I just don’t like driving through a town and seeing everything closed or run down.”
From Standard Station To Boutique
Borchardt, in talking with Hopkins about the Tri-County Mercantile and how he’s made that work, learned that he and his partners, Jesse and Arden Miller, had long wanted to do something productive with the Standard Station.
“It’s very expensive to make it a gas station,” Borchardt said. “To really make that a gas station the right way would probably be, I mean, a million dollars.”
The Standard Station has served as event headquarters for the car show held in conjunction with the Chugwater Chili Cook-off each year, playing off its vintage Standard Station vibe.
It’s a tiny space, Borchardt said, but the more she thought about it the more she realized it was perfect.
“I just needed more of an office/showroom space to work out of,” she said. “And, as my daughter is getting older, I’m also the high school volleyball coach, so I’m constantly going into town.”
Moving her towering totes into town made a lot of sense, she decided. It would let her display her items better for photography, as well as create a storefront for the “high season” — her way of describing summer, when tourism foot traffic starts pattering through Wyoming.
Hopkins and his partners agreed that if Borchardt and her husband would fix up the Standard Station, they would pro-rate the rent. Borchardt had to keep the station historic, which was fine for her, considering her business is a vintage Western clothing boutique.
“I made the gas pumps into a garden and kept the aesthetic, the color scheme,” she said. “I had to match the perfect Standard Station red, and things like that.”
She also hand-made her signs, fitting them into an aesthetic she’s seen at other businesses in town, which also have hand-painted signs.
Her opening day was Chugwater Chili Cook-off day — just barely.
Vintage Value
Vintage clothing is having a moment now. The reason, Borchardt believes, is due to something her father always talked about when she was growing up in a fashion-forward family.
“My dad always taught me quality over quantity,” she said. “You can have a suit hand-stitched in Italy that your grandpa can pass down, even after it’s been dry-cleaned 300 times.”
That’s ultimately a better value than buying a suit needing replacement within a year or two. While the better-made, classic suit will cost more, the cost per wearing is much less than for a cheaply made garment that won’t survive many washings.
“I got made fun of as a kid, because people would joke, ‘Oh, your dad sells silk socks for $100',” Borchardt recalled. “But there’s always someone who will pay for quality, if they understand its value.”
That makes the hand-me-down side of her vintage clothing business particularly special.
“As a kid, I wanted to just look like everybody else,” she said. “But now I appreciate what he was trying to teach me. You don’t have to buy a lot, but you buy classic staples. You can have a leather jacket for your whole life if you buy the right one.”
Inside her Standard Station store, the classics range from worn-in, pearl-snap shirts and tooled leather belts to fringed jackets and well-made wool suits. All are one-of-a-kind pieces sourced from ranch closets, estate sales, and small-town thrift shops across the region.
Here’s Your Sign
Borchardt’s first day, with the Chugwater Chili Cook-off in town, went well.
People from Wheatland, Cheyenne, Denver, Texas, and other places who had come for the cook-off were finding items they just could not live without.
The real test, she realized, is now that the cook-off has left town and all the Texan and Floridian chili champions have gone home.
“I didn’t open Sunday because it was Father’s Day,” she said. “But Monday morning I said, ‘You know what, I’ve put my hours up and I’ve got to stick to it. So I went in at 11, because right now my hours are saying 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. every day.”
And something pretty cool happened that has her confident this idea is actually going to work.
“I was sitting there thinking no one from Chugwater Town is going to be my bread and butter,” she said. “They’ll love that I’m here, and they’ll come to visit, but I don’t know if they’re going to be buying stuff they maybe already have or that’s not unique to them.”
But right about then, an 80-year-old local man from Third Street came rolling up on his bicycle and stopped to look around.
“He bought a fringe leather moto jacket and a belt buckle,” Borchardt said. “And he’s like, ‘I had that jacket in the 1980s, and I always wanted another. I don’t have a motorcycle anymore, but I’ve got my bike.”
And now he has a high-quality, 1980s leather jacket that’s channeling all the nostalgia he was seeking.
“That was my first big local customer,” Borchardt said.
In that moment, all the pieces felt like they were coming together. She might be a city girl who married a rancher from Chugwater, but she’s finding the way to keep her creative sparks alive and bloom right where she’s been planted.
With her vintage Western boutique in an old Standard Station, she’s part of a new wave of pioneers betting that history and hospitality will keep Chugwater’s main street from going dark.
And she’s proud to be in the midst of this revival of a tiny American town whose residents refuse to let it dwindle away and die.
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
