What’s so great about consignment shops? Why does your town treasure your business? And how can we activate those reasons to turn our shops and our customers into a gift that helps our community?

• They treasure your shop because you’re local. The money stays local: local people make it (your consignors), local people save it (your buyers), local people earn local dollars (you and your staff.)
• You CARE local. You help support close-to-home charitable causes.
• You’re personable. They know you.
• You’re eco-correct. No great ecological cost transporting merchandise around. When they buy gently-used, there is practically zero carbon footprint involved.

So let’s imagine a holiday shopping promotion that will play on all your strengths. How about

Buy One Gift One

Here’s how it works. You find out what your local charities need. It will probably be jeans, sweaters, and shoes. Possibly outerwear as well. (For home decor/ furniture consignment shops, think kitchen basics and blankets.) Then design your promotion: Buy a pair of jeans and MyShop will DONATE a pair of jeans to NameofCharity. Or a sweater or a coat or…

How can you do this? Well, there’s the beauty in this promo. You have a NTY rack, right? You have generous consignors who would be thrilled to bring in not-really-salable-but-perfectly-suitable jeans/coats/sweaters, right?

So get a BIG cardboard box from your local appliance store. Wrap it in festive paper (I’ll excuse you from the gift-wrap problem today.) Set it with the open part sideways so shoppers can watch as it fills from the nearby pile of neatly-folded items ready to help out a less-secure family… said items being stacked next to the “gift box.”

Every time a customers buys an item(s) you’ve chosen for your promo from your store stock, you take the same type of item from the pile and place it in the box. Maybe that stack of ready-to-donate items/ the to-be-filled box could be in your display window. It would even be fun to have a big string of sleigh bells to let your shopper ring as you do so!

One of the beauties of this promo is that your consignors, and even your customers, will be happy to participate in building the “able to be donated” pile. They may surprise you at how readily they’ll drop by a handful of sweaters for your “gift to charity” pile as they say I knew these aren’t the styles you’d consign but I didn’t know what to do with them.

Other beauties of this promo: It doesn’t cost you a lot, it doesn’t put you in direct competition with the “new” stores with their ever-increasing price reductions, it’s newsworthy re the media/ press releases, it’s photogenic (think Evening News and front page of the paper), it helps the charities with specifically what they need, and best of all, it’s local…just like your shop.

(Doesn’t hurt that your promo has the word “gift” in it, either…get those shoppers thinking of your shop as a gift-shopping destination!)

What do you think? Doable for your shop? A good way to give back to your community? Worth the effort, for the good will?