Auntie Kate The Resale Expert

Here’s a problem unique to resale, consignment and thrift stores. It’s called:

ONE OF EVERYTHING

and it’s a real challenge to a shopkeeper. How can you display for sale items as diverse as a velvet loveseat, a pair of vintage Frye boots, a crib mobile and dozens of platters and hundreds of t-shirts?

And then, when you get THAT figured out, guess what? Next week you’ll have a dog kennel, someone’s paperweight collection, and six, count ’em six, dining room sets.

Those “new” retailers have depth: lots of Brita pitchers or Barbies or bananas… so they can store the extras in their back room. We, on the other hand, have

ONE OF EVERYTHING

and we need not only to find space for it, but we need to present each piece of merchandise in a way that will get it sold. That’s only good business, of course. Goods crammed together don’t cry out to customers to go home with them.

So, many storekeepers jam things together in an effort to make space. They might even pile bedsheets on the loveseat and cover a for-sale table with 4 different sets of china (any flat surface is fair game!) The shop ends up looking like a storage facility instead of a store. It’s hard to shop, almost impossible to be inspired to impulse-buy, and the only thing left to do is to lower prices. People will root around for bargains.

But presenting each piece in a way that will sell it is a more profitable way to run your business. And in the case of consignment shops, it’s good ethics as well. We don’t want to be put in the position of covering over Consignor #3821’s Wedgwood platter with #7239’s hand-painted wooden tray. That’s not putting forth our best selling effort for either consignor, which is our part of the consignment agreement.

So how do we manage to find attractive, appealing ways to show our shoppers all the goods we have? It ain’t easy. It’s a balancing act. But the worst-possible solution is the storage unit approach.

• Stack those pictures, pile those platters
• Cram those vases one touching the next on the tall shelf over there
• Toss all the linens in a deep bin
• Just FIND A PLACE FOR IT

Do enough of this, and your shop looks like someone just rolled up the overhead door at Sam’s Storage Cells. A garage sale between walls. You will only sell things if you offer garage-sale-level prices. Not good business, and not good stewardship of consigned goods.

Take a look around your shop. Have you lined the hallway to the rest room with paintings leaning against one another, 8 deep? Is that bottom back shelf (the one in the shadows, there, or is that dust that’s making everything so grey?) a crush of canisters? That rack a jostle of jumpers?

It’s not easy. Sigh. At least, we won’t be out of a job anytime soon, figuring out daily how to deal with

ONE OF EVERYTHING

Unless, of course, we turn our merchandise SHOWroom into a STOREroom. That way, we might as well put our business into cold storage.