Margaret Daole and Dave Crider of Googie Style are hunters.

Clawing their way through garage sales, flea markets and estate sales, they find treasures with which to fill their galleries, carefully curated with vintage and mid-century furniture; art and unusual décor; as well as Crider's handmade furniture.

In November, Googie moved from a small Madison Avenue storefront in Lakewood to a 2,500-square-foot warehouse space on West 33rd Street in Cleveland's Clark-Fulton neighborhood on the city's West Side.

Customers call first to wander their two galleries, accessible primarily by a smooth, wooden stairway worn from almost 130 years of foot traffic. On the third floor, jazz plays and light floods in windows where art deco chandeliers hang, framed by the houses and sprawling warehouses below, both functioning and in need of some love.

When Daole and Crider began looking to move from their cramped Lakewood shop, they envisioned a spacious warehouse in a community with plenty of room for growth. This is exactly what they've found in historic Clark-Fulton, where MetroHealth — a community anchor — is investing almost $1 billion to remake its campus, and countless businesses, aware of the close proximity to economic powerhouses Ohio City, Tremont and Detroit Shoreway, are cropping up.

Googie initially launched as an online store. Even now, eBay sales remain a large part of their business, as do custom orders and shows like the Cleveland Flea, Avon Lake's Summer Market and furniture design showcase F*SHO.

"We have an international business," said Daole, whose phone periodically mimics the sound of a cash register closing yet another online sale. "We happen to be in Cleveland, Ohio, on West 33rd Street, but on eBay, we're open 24 hours a day, seven days a week all over the world."

Daole and Crider are somewhat unlikely partners. The first time they met, they wandered the Cleveland Museum of Art. The two talked all day about the prospect of getting into the vintage business, Daole sharing stories of past finds.

"I was intrigued," said Crider, who also has a workspace at Soulcraft Woodshop.

Soon, Daole began taking Crider to estate sales and flea markets. He watched, stunned, as she picked up items like art glass priced at $10 and worth $2,000.

"Can you teach me how to shop like that?" he asked. Recognizing his natural eye for finding unique items, she agreed.

About 40 years earlier, when Daole moved from Atlanta to Cleveland, she started shopping garage sales to fill her Lakewood apartment. She didn't know anything about antiquing. One day, she saw a sign for a garage sale and stopped, only to find an elaborate set of china spread out on bed sheets all over the seller's lawn. With only paper plates at home, she negotiated a $30 price tag. A few days later, she had a friend over for dinner, an antique dealer named Frank Otebra, whom she'd met at the grocery store months earlier.

"Oh my god, where did you get all this stuff? Do you know what you have?" she remembers him gasping. Her china, it turned out, was a desirable brand called Flow Blue, and Otebra estimated she had about $20,000 worth of it.

The two ate with plastic forks Daole would soon replace with high-end silverware, as Otebra — just one of the mentors who has come into her life — began teaching her his business.

"I'm going to show you how to shop," he told her.