Harry Sterling is under a table. It’s a cold Sunday afternoon and Sterling, 28, is crouched beneath a 200-year-old drop-leaf at the Cambridge Antique Market, looking for signs of craftsmanship — dovetail joints instead of nails, for instance — and sturdiness. While other guys in Boston are clustered around televisions rooting for their team this afternoon, Sterling is here, running his hand over colonial wood. Is he an Antiques Roadshow expert or an interior designer? No; he’s a Style Digger.

You’ve seen them around: the woman you pass in the grocery store wearing a mint-condition 1940s mackinaw over utility pants, with red Doc Martens peeking out beneath; the couple that bought your grandmother’s china hutch at a flea market and gave it a second life as a display case for their LPs. Out of a desire to surround themselves with items that reflect their individuality, Style Diggers are the people who keep antique shops, vintage clothiers, and used-record stores in business. They willingly dig through the detritus of time in search of that which can’t be mass-produced: personal style.

Unlike most of his demographic peers, you won’t see Sterling frequenting the Gap or flipping through an Ikea or Pottery Barn catalogue for home fixtures, yet he generally doesn’t spend more for clothes or furnishings than those who do their shopping at such retail giants. The Style Diggers’ secret is that they don’t typically pay more than the rest of us. They just spend their money better: getting longer-lasting items that set them apart from the crowd. Any savings are just a bonus.

Pointing out a wooden swivel desk chair, Sterling explains, "I don’t really care if a piece costs the same or less as it would new. If you really like something, just compare its craftsmanship to Target, dollar for dollar, and see which is better. There’s no way something made cheap now is gonna hold up. And it adds value to have something a little unique."

Case in point: the desk chair in question is 50 years old, with an elegant carved back and a rocking spring motion that still works. Cost: $75 — half the price of an Office Max swivel chair in a hideous fabric, and a sixth of the price of a similar wood chair purchased new.

But Sterling passes on it anyway; he’s already got a similar one, and he’s no impulse shopper — a Style Digger never buys just to make a purchase. "I go to these places over and over, and half the time I don’t buy anything," he says. "You have to be willing to walk away." He’ll even revisit a piece as he decides whether it fits his vision for his condo; he checked out the same vintage brass bed in Cambridge for several months before buying it, which earned him a friendly relationship with the store’s owners and led to a discount on another piece, a vintage phone that he couldn’t get for the price he wanted solely by haggling. When he finally bought the bed after all that time, they could hardly say no to his reasonable request that they cut him a deal on the phone.

Why put so much effort into the process? For fellow Style Digger Sarah Di Troia of Cambridge, the answer is simple: "The chase is half the fun." Whenever Di Troia travels with her husband, searching for a find is part of the ritual, as they scout small resale shops for hats and funky shoes. A blue Kentucky Derby bonnet that might look matronly on an older woman is a toque of style and wit on her. (Not to be outdone, her husband can pull off wearing a mean pastel garden-party jacket.)

Di Troia takes real pleasure in discovery and is adept at finding clothing that allows her persona to shine through without breaking the bank. At Bobby From Boston — which sells mostly men’s clothing — she was bowled over by a red 1950s L.L. Bean shirt that now earns her compliments a half-century after its first wearing.

"Basically, I hate looking like everyone else," Di Troia says. "Even if Banana Republic or Prada does something I aesthetically really like, I just won’t buy it if it can be identified" as being their item of the moment. Instead, she often hunts down the original item that the current style is copying, once even stumbling upon a decades-old mink coat for $250 that was being copied that season by Gucci and sold for thousands. (She opted not to buy it — and has regretted it ever since.)

Though Di Troia loves to sift through the past century, she’s not wed to vintage: even Filene’s Basement — where antique is limited to last season — can be a treasure-trove, and she dazzled at least one holiday party’s guests by wearing brocade mid-length pants that she found marked down at the Basement.