Quinn Brown spent $3.07 on a yellow Lakers jacket at the Goodwill Bins in Hillsboro. On Monday, July 20, that jacket sold for $89,600 at Sotheby's in New York.
The 19-year-old Lincoln High School alum turned a January thrift-store grab into a roughly 29,000-fold return, after Sotheby's authenticators confirmed the short-sleeved warmup belonged to Wilt Chamberlain and was worn during the 1972 NBA Finals.
The sale fell short of Sotheby's pre-auction estimate of $150,000 to $250,000, set when bidding opened July 1. But for a teenager who paid pocket change at a store that prices clothes by the pound, $89,600 qualifies as life-changing.
Brown, who learned to thrift from his older sister while attending Lincoln, has been reselling used clothes online for three years. His biggest prior sale was a Sub Pop Records T-shirt that went for $250. He spotted the Chamberlain jacket on January 15 when another shopper tossed it back into a massive bin at the Hillsboro location. Brown grabbed it.
The jacket is collared, Lakers gold, with a team logo on the chest and "Chamberlain" stitched across the back in purple. After buying it, Brown researched online and found photos of Chamberlain wearing a matching jacket. He compared stitching details on the Lakers patch and checked measurements against a known Chamberlain jersey.
Sotheby's enlisted the firm SIA Photo Match to verify the jacket. Authenticators matched it to photos from three NBA games, including the 1972 Finals, in which the Lakers beat the New York Knicks and Chamberlain won Finals MVP. The jacket was also matched to the 1972-73 season, Chamberlain's last, when he set the single-season field goal percentage record of 72.7%.
Chamberlain, a Hall of Famer who played from 1959 to 1973, still holds the single-game scoring record of 100 points, set in 1962. A game jersey he wore during the same 1972 Finals sold for $4.9 million at Sotheby's in 2023.
Brown says he plans to invest the proceeds in property or the stock market, after first taking a vacation to Vietnam with friends.
