“Cover your ears,” Audrie San Miguel says playfully to LuCretia Sisk. Her once-boss, now-predecessor, steward of Room Service Vintage, isn’t one for sentimentality, but San Miguel has something she wants to say: “She taught me everything I know.”
“Well,” Sisk butts in, ears evidently uncovered. “She learned it by herself, though. It’s not like I was holding her hand.”
After 26 years selling her own finds in the store and managing the shop’s vendors and employees, Sisk is hardly ready to stop hunting down vintage wares, but she’s tired of the day-to-day people-wrangling. San Miguel was the first actual employee of Room Service, hired by Sisk for a once-a-week position manning the cash register for the shop’s handful of vendors. That role grew to include her own 80-foot booth in the North Loop staple, and eventually led to San Miguel opening her own shop on South Congress, Prototype Vintage.
Seated on a baby blue, crescent-shaped couch just inside the shop’s front door, framed by fluted glassware in every shade of blue, green, and yellow, Sisk reminisces on her early days of Room Service ownership. She barely had her foot in the door when founder Patsy Crocker tapped her to take over the space, then dimly lit and lightly stocked. As Sisk tells it, Crocker already had her eye on skipping town when she poached Sisk’s booth from another vintage store and installed her in the front left corner of Room Service, still the anchor of her vending area.
“She was kind of looking for the right person for her vision of the place,” Sisk explains. “She wanted somebody who was going to have a sense of humor about it.”
For over two decades, that somebody was Sisk, a dedicated collector who only wears costumes on non-holidays and proudly shows me a shirt airbrushed with a middle finger-giving rabbit that she received from her employee Aaron Sandoval – who might cry, looking on from behind the counter.
Sisk introduced the eclectic hanging lights and quick stock turnover – and the credit card reader – to the vintage den, imparting her character through her business model and the pieces she sourced to sell there. As the keys fall into San Miguel’s hands, that character looks just as bold and colorful.
“I’m the kind of nerd that really likes to analyze data,” San Miguel says. “I try to find the best way to go with the flow with the history of what came before.”
“Everybody has their own weird attachment to Room Service, and it’s [in] one of the last few truly Austin neighborhoods.” – Audrie San Miguel
From that vantage point, the salt-and-pepper-haired shopkeeper wants to lean into what she feels already works at Room Service. Her first move is already in play: She’s extended the store’s hours from noon to 6pm to 10am to 8pm to maximize spillover from neighboring coffee and happy hour crowds. San Miguel will also expand the fitting rooms and selling area while maintaining the shop’s signature “burn-and-turn” daily restock mentality and keeping Prototype running, alongside business partner Emily Larson, across town.
“I feel like I get the best of both worlds because down south at Prototype, it’s like we’re the welcome wagon for all the tourists that are visiting Austin, and we get to send them to all of our favorite places. And then up here, I get the locals. I get to see my friends regularly. It’s got a lot of repeat customers here,” San Miguel explains. “Everybody has their own weird attachment to Room Service, and it’s [in] one of the last few truly Austin neighborhoods. Not a lot of stores still maintain that same vibe and independent spirit.”
Many of those returning patrons have picked up on another change to Room Service’s facade already in the works: Its idiosyncratic, space-themed neon light is getting a face lift. Storms earlier this year flooded the store and damaged the glass sign, prompting Sisk and San Miguel to jump-start transitioning an old layaway room – “Nobody knows what layaway is anymore,” says San Miguel – into more shopping space, and a storage closet into enlarged fitting rooms, while the sign is carefully repaired and fortified.
As essential as that extravagant sign has become to North Loop’s silhouette, Sisk’s section of the storeroom floor is indispensable to the shop’s landscape. Like the other things that make this secondhand gem shine, that isn’t going anywhere. In fact, San Miguel plans to expand Sisk’s footprint further now that her forebear will have more time to travel and track down colorful kitsch.
“From my perspective, LuCretia is an expert at finding and selling and filling the store with the most awesome merch ever,” the new owner says, grinning at her longtime mentor and friend. “As the strongest seller in the store, it’s like – as a customer – I want her to get out there and go.”
Room Service debuts its expanded space with an open house on August 30.
This article appears in August 29 • 2025.