Lars | Keep It Classic

Co-owner of Keep It Classic. Runs the back of the shop. Pricing, ordering, shipping, the website, the bookkeeping, and the systems that connect them. Most in-store customers have never met him. That is by design. The floor is Ray and Marissa's domain. The spreadsheet is Lars's.

What Lars handles

Lars co-owns Keep It Classic with Ray. His work is the operational substrate the shop runs on:

  1. Pricing and inventory systems. Catalog data structure, attribute completeness, condition grading in the system, Shopify metafield schema, category taxonomy. Every product on keepitclassiclv.com has a consistent data shape because Lars built the rules.
  2. Shipping and fulfillment. Ground Advantage is the default. Media Mail is available at checkout for eligible categories. International shipping covers 28 countries. Lars packs most of the shop's outgoing orders himself.
  3. E-commerce and online ops. The Shopify storefront, the theme, the Google Merchant Center feed, the Search Console work, the Instagram-to-journal backfill, the AI-copywriting pipeline with a human approval gate. The online surface is Lars's ongoing build.
  4. Bookkeeping and business. The ledger, the bank, the taxes, the landlord. Lars is the co-owner of record on the business side.

Where the expertise sits

The specific lanes:

  • Vintage e-commerce on mid-tier Shopify. Everything the shop runs online is built inside Shopify Online Store and Shop, without Shopify Plus. Includes custom metafield schemas, metaobject-driven content surfaces (events, drops, weekly picks, team profiles like this one), Liquid theme development, and the five-channel publishing discipline (Online Store, Shop, POS, Google & YouTube, Facebook & Instagram).
  • Google Merchant Center for vintage / one-of-one inventory. Condition, age-group, gender, category, and GTIN handling on items without factory identifiers. Appeal strategy for GMC misrepresentation suspensions on vintage catalogs. Shopify metafield-to-GMC attribute mapping (shopify.color-pattern, shopify.size, and the metaobject-reference pattern that Google actually reads).
  • SEO for vintage retail. Schema stack (Product + UsedCondition, CollectionPage, BreadcrumbList, FAQPage, LocalBusiness, Article with Person author). Internal linking at scale. Collection-page SEO content depth. The editorial backlog that hangs off the catalog rather than competing with it.
  • Condition grading at a retail scale. Working with Ray to formalize the KIC Condition Scale so the same grade means the same thing across a wrestling tee, a cartridge, a VHS, and a jersey. That scale is documented at /pages/condition-scale.
  • Inventory curation at volume. Not just what comes in. Also what gets archived, what gets drafted for re-shoot, and what never hits the floor at all. The cultural-risk gate that blocks reactivation of certain archived pieces without provenance is a Lars-built system rule.

Evidence of tenure

  • Co-owner, Keep It Classic, 2023-present. Container Park storefront opened in 2023. Online at keepitclassiclv.com since then.
  • Has been sourcing vintage with Ray for years before the current storefront. The sourcing network and the acquisitions cadence predate the current brand.
  • Active catalog is approximately 1,228 products across wrestling, sports jerseys, VHS, retro video games, toys, apparel, and collectibles. Roughly 241 orders per month as of Q2 2026.
  • 1,404 URLs in the public sitemap. 791 URL redirects maintained to protect equity across catalog transitions. 510+ internal links in the collection and journal graph (target: 2,000+).

What Lars writes

On the site, Lars is cited as the author on:

  • "From the Floor" journal entries. Short operational notes about what came into the shop, what it sat next to, what it sold for.
  • Shipping, returns, and ops-voice customer service copy (policies, order notifications, the FAQ where the question is "how does this get to me").
  • The KIC Condition Scale (/pages/condition-scale) and ops-adjacent authenticity notes (VHS rental-vs-retail, cartridge label variants for retro games, used-game plug-test methodology).
  • B2B, press, and partnership outreach on the business-and-financial side. Ray handles editorial and cultural press.

How to reach Lars

  • Email. info@keepitclassiclv.com for anything shop-related. If the question is business, partnership, or ops, route it to Lars in the subject line.
  • Phone. (702) 605-3332, same as the shop.
  • Instagram. @lars.elmqvist is his personal handle. The shop account is @keepitclassiclv.
  • Mail. Keep It Classic, 707 E Fremont St Suite 1170, Las Vegas NV 89101.

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