Denim Hunter Brit Eaton Is the Indiana Jones of Old Jeans

For 25 years, Brit Eaton has been scouring dumpsters, burrowing into abandoned mines, and eviscerating the stuffing in old scarecrows and sofas in his quest to unearth, salvage, and resell vintage denim: His treasure hunting for old jeans earned him his incredibly apt Instagram moniker, @OriginalIndianaJeans.

Typically he’ll resell a pair of vintage jeans for around $150, but on a fall afternoon earlier this month, at his first-ever Durango Vintage Festivus in Colorado, he auctioned off the Levi’s equivalent of the Ark of the Covenant: a tattered, dirt-smeared pair of jeans from the 1800s, dotted with wax from a miner’s candle, that looked like it had been pulled off a skeleton wearing a headlamp. Eaton had paid $23,000 for them in 2019. The winning bid? $76,000, his highest-ever denim sale. (His previous biggest sale was for a one-pocket 1890s Levi’s, which brought in over $50,000.)

That wasn’t his only denim windfall that weekend. He set off a Blue Friday-like frenzy when he dumped a pile of clothing (most at least 50 years old) in the center of the room, and frenzied collectors shoved each other to grab armfuls to buy for ten dollars a pound. Eaton claims to have made $40,000 from that pile of denim alone, and he says he has another thousane piles just like it stored in his 10 warehouses.

To vintage aficionados, the 52-year-old Eaton is the go-to denim guy, unearthing vintage pieces from across the American West. “I’ve always been a treasure hunter,” he says over Zoom, a week after the dust literally settled in his Festivus tent. At 52, he is compact and muscular in a gray t-shirt, with just a hint of salt in his black outdoorsman’s beard. “I’ve always wanted a shortcut.” It’s hard to call what he does “the easy path,” however: A typical day might find him precariously rappelling down into an old mine shaft before digging through dust and rock, lit only by a head torch, in search of the perfect jacket a miner left behind 100 years prior. Or knocking on ranch-house doors to ask owners for permission to hunt for old clothing in their tumbledown home, whether forgotten in closets or used as decades-old wall insulation.

A few years ago, he took his Indy homage to new extremes. During a single day, he:

• was nearly run down by a startled moose while searching a remote ranch for its owners
• while escaping said moose, accidentally trapped himself in a building with three panicked great horned owls
• nearly walked into the path of a thundering, 200-pound lion that was fleeing an approaching train
• stepped on a nail, which shot all the way through his shoe into his foot, nearly giving him blood poisoning
• twisted his ankle, leaving him hobbling until a passing motorist picked him up…
• …and dropped him off at another ranch, where he unearthed and purchased $10,000 worth of denim from the ranch’s elderly owners.

“The amount of times I have once-in-a-lifetime things happen in one day is unbelievable,” Eaton laughs. “I go to some really remote places where there’s more wildlife than there is humanity. I get beat up doing what I do. That particular day was one for the record books.”

Based in Durango, he lives with his wife, Kelly, marketing director for a local women’s resource center, who, he says, “tolerates” his business: “She’s helpful but doesn’t understand it, and is clueless as to why I make the investments I do and what items in my collection are worth.” He also has two kids, Zealand and Indie. “None of them really has any interest in what I do,” Brit says, “but Kelly does like to wear 50s Levi’s, and my son Zealand now almost exclusively wears ‘80s t-shirts he finds in my warehouses.”

Eaton claims to have sold millions of items of unearthed clothing. The Durango Vintage Festivus was a rare mass event for him: Eaton prefers direct one-to-one sales, often to people who have contacted him through his Instagram page. Occasionally he has buyers fly out to see him from all over the world, particularly Japan and Europe, where there is a big demand for Americana. Some pieces go to museums. Some go to brand archives for the likes of Levi’s or Dickies. Some pieces are bought by movie costume departments, or as references for fashion designers.

“The market is everywhere. It’s really great to see,” he says, and attributes the hunger for vintage clothing to people wanting to hold on to tactile materials from the past in an increasingly digital age, as well as a growing dedication to recycling. “There is an environmental ethic to buying old clothing,” he says.

Whether it’s thrifters (the search for “‘vintage jeans”’ on TikTok has a combined 11.1 billion views) or seven-digit bidders, collectors increasingly consider denim a grail item up there with vintage sneakers. It’s durable, long lasting, looks good, and has been made by master craftsmen. “Denim is an artistic canvas that gets painted through time by its own experiences,” Eaton explains. “Every pair gets faded a different way. Every pair of jeans becomes a unique snowflake…. There’s the intrinsic beauty of it, then there’s the financial value of it—vintage denim only adds value, so it’s an investment. It’s the same with any art. You collect it because it’s cool, you see it and say, ‘I need that in my life, especially if it’s rare.’”

Speaking with Eaton is an intense experience, an adventure in itself as his excitable mind seems to be running in ten different directions at once. He’ll get up and grab objects—spurs, an address binder—to illustrate a point, and his tales of desert adventure often swerve into something else halfway through. He begins a story about almost losing his life down a mine by backtracking to the time he owned a store in Durango (selling less interesting, none-denim finds). This sparks a digression about a dentist customer of that shop who was interested in geology…and we never get back to the mine, let alone any life-threatening circumstances. With a book due out soon, perhaps Eaton is saving his best stories for later. Or, perhaps his life is so full of adventure that it’s hard for his mind to settle on just one of them.

Originally from Trenton, New Jersey, Eaton has always been an unabashed capitalist. At ten years old he sold handmade toys and forts at flea markets; as a teen he graduated to bootleg Grateful Dead tees. In high school he was known as “the weed man.” In college he had four or five businesses going.

But throughout his career, Levi’s have been a constant. He first recognized their market in the early ‘90s when he sailed around the world in the Semester At Sea program. “Everywhere I went, people wanted my Levi’s, my Marlboro cigarettes—anything American, because they couldn’t get it back home,” Eaton remembers. “I would sell my ten-dollar pairs of Levi’s to anyone who wanted them. In Africa, I traded a used pair for a hand-carved chessboard that probably would have cost $5,000 in the U.S.”

When he got back to the States, Eaton capitalized on this desire for American goods by selling hand-restored Harley Davidsons to friends in Norway, while moving the occasional pair of Levi’s on the side. (Motorcycles, he reasoned, were much “sexier” than jeans.) But logistically, it was much easier to ship jeans to Europe than Harleys. And while most people could afford a $150 pair of Levi’s, few could afford the $50,000 price tag of a Harley. Eaton’s decision to fully pivot to exporting jeans was made easier after he drunkenly fell off his bike and landed in a well, and Harleys became even less appealing as a career. “You don’t have to kickstart a pair of jeans,” he deadpans.

When Eaton moved to Florida after college, selling Levi’s was initially just a side hustle to his day job working on a commercial fishing boat out of Fort Lauderdale. He would pick up old Levi’s from flea markets, taking advantage of Florida’s status as the retirement hub of America. “Turns out there’s a lot of old denim in Florida because everyone goes there to die,” he says.

After he got in a fight with his fishing-boat captain, was fired, and went broke, he made denim-hunting his full-time career and expanded his search. A friend hooked him up with a connection at a secondhand store, where Eaton bought a 3,000-pound bale of Levi’s. On another occasion he took a wrong turn driving home and came across a cavernous warehouse piled high with old clothes.

“I pull over and it’s a rag house, with this guy sending all this shit to Haiti,” Eaton says. “But they don’t want denim because it’s too hot. I was able to dig through the discards and load up my truck for 25 dollars every time I went, because otherwise the guy was taking it to the trash. I turned every 25-dollar stop into $2,000, selling to my contacts in Europe.”

Business was underway, but Eaton wanted to find more profitable, older denim. “I didn’t get the same dopamine rush from a pair of 1980s jeans anymore, so I went to go find 1970s jeans, then 1960s, and so on,” he recalls. Unlike humid, wet Florida, desert states are ideal for preserving old denim. It’s hot and dry, so the material doesn’t rot, and, when abandoned for decades in mine shafts, old jackets and jeans are protected from light fading, too. Eaton had wanted to live out West ever since his childhood family trips to a Wyoming ranch: There, at the age of nine, he began to poke around the ranch dump, digging up relics like one of the first-ever license plates issued in the state. In 1997, Eaton decided to move West, picking Colorado on a whim.

Now, Eaton owns the rights to his very own deserted mine, one stuffed with pre-1910 trash that he describes as his “Big Rock Candy Mountain.” In another Instagram video, Eaton films himself on his knees, dramatically lit by a shaft of light as he digs into the wall of his mine. As dust gathers around him, he giddily excavates his treasure, a pair of dirty but otherwise perfectly intact “Popular Overalls,” a brand that he’d never heard of before, and which, without his intervention, would have been lost to time in the bottom of this shaft.

It isn’t all about digging underground, though. Wherever he goes, his eyes scan for denim. “I’m a total opportunist,” Eaton says, claiming he’s bought coveralls off a gas-station attendant in Africa, and fished a $500 pair of Levi’s out of a dumpster he happened to glance in while walking past. A steadier source of treasures has been the old homesteads that litter ranches and former ranches in the West. Much like digging through old mines and dumpsters, exploring old or abandoned properties is pot luck. Eaton might visit 20 properties in a day. If things look right, he might offer the owners $100 just to let him look around. Half of them might not let him inside, but when they do, Eaton estimates he can spend an average of $2,000 per house, but sometimes it could be as high as $10,000. He’ll try to make back his investment with the best five or so items. The others he might sell for as little as ten to fifteen dollars.

Eaton has spent 25 years developing tricks and clues that can lead him to a house’s hidden denim, though he won’t reveal what they are. (Trade secrets.) He vaguely likens it to meeting the right woman in a bar. “It could be just something distinctive about that person,” he says. “Something that catches your eye.”

To find the good stuff, he says, you need a sense of what previous generations did with their old clothes. For example, poor workers didn’t just throw their clothes away: In abandoned homes, Eaton has found old—and valuable—denim stuffed into sofas, or used as insulation in walls or padding inside scarecrows and boxing bags. “You find stuff in crazy ways when you start looking,” he says. “I don’t just rip open people’s sofas [on a whim]. It’s more like you have to believe it before you see it. At this point I don’t expect to find things in someone’s attic, I just have to check them.” Eaton likens it to checking 1,000 oysters on the off chance that one might contain a pearl. After twenty-plus years in the business, he isn’t frustrated by all the dead ends because, time and again, his patience has yielded results.

These days, Eaton spends less and less time down mines, or poring over maps of old homesteads. As his reputation has grown, so has his network of informers and contacts who might know about a stash of old denim. He keeps an eight-inch-thick binder full of names and addresses collected as he works people like a detective searching for leads on a big case.

Not that Eaton really needs to keep searching out old Levi’s. “I’ve got so much stuff already accrued that I don’t even know I have, that I could be selling this stuff forever,” he says, his $40,000 pile from the Festivus being one such example. And, as the pursuit of old denim becomes more popular, he’s now competing with other scavengers. “There are now thousands of people out there looking for stuff,” he says, “which makes it harder.”

This blue-jean gold rush has brought him into conflict with other denim sellers, especially those of younger generations, some of whom he thinks can be less scrupulous in their business practices. “I’m in an argument with a guy right now,” Eaton says. “I saw this beautiful shirt pop up on his Instagram. I texted him and he said he’d sold it for $500. I said, ‘That’s too bad. See if you can buy it back from the guy and I’ll give you $1,250.’ He said he hadn’t shipped it yet so he’d just ship it to me instead. I said ‘No, man, you can’t do that. I don’t want my new collection piece having bad karma just because you found out it was worth more.’ It makes me not want to let the guy come to my next show, because he’s so freakin’ greedy and stupid. You make a deal with someone, you have to honor your deal.

“My wife tells me I have to keep my mouth shut,” Eaton continues, “but I’m trying to educate the young people in this business, man. They don’t understand karma.”

At the same time, Eaton readily acknowledges that the youth are keeping his industry alive. To illustrate this, he demonstrates a pair of vintage cowboy spurs from the 1930s with beautiful leatherwork and silver snake detailing. He used to collect cowboy memorabilia, he says, “But you go to shows and the guys selling this stuff are themselves antiques. That’s what would happen to the vintage clothing business if it wasn’t for young, enthusiastic people getting into this.”

Though Eaton could finish off his career by slowly emptying out his warehouse, it’s unlikely he could bring himself to quit the quest. The pursuit of hidden or forgotten denim is the reward in and of itself. After 40 days spent planning and holding the Durango Vintage Festivus, he’ll decompress with a vacation in Mexico, but he’s already thinking about his next lead. “I met a guy that tears down homesteads for a living, and he told me about a property that I can spend two months digging around and never get to the bottom of the stuff,” Eaton enthuses. “That’s my next thing. It might not amount to a hill of beans, but just having the dream of this property in the back of my head is what keeps me up at night. It’s what keeps me going.”