Auntie Kate The Resale Expert

When a potential supplier to your consignment, resale, or thrift shop asks about bringing items in, what happens?

I mean, besides your friendly, upbeat enthusiasm?

Do you have a how-to brochure right on your counter (and in your entry and by the dressing rooms for easy pick-up) that they can take home with them, to

turn their impulse into dollars for them, your shop, your cause?

No, no, no. I do not mean a copy of your consignment agreement or a flier about the good your charity does. Or even “what we buy.” I mean a real, honest-to-goodness how-to handout that will not only

increase quality incoming

but save you time,

and save them face.

If you don’t have a how-to handout now or if yours is not as welcoming as you would like, this would be a good weekend to develop one.

Points to remember as you develop the language for your brochure:

• Keep it light and easy, open and encouraging.
• Use bullet points (they’re so easy to scan, aren’t they? You’re doing it now.)
• Show your personality. Imagine you’re speaking to one person. You wouldn’t boss them around, would you?
• Brag on your business. Project confidence that your shop will be able to sell their goods well.
• Point out, in a subtle way, how your shop can help them pass on their underloved possessions better/ more effectively than any of the alternatives available to them.

Don’t forget to include:

• What’s in it for them (it’s not ALL about the money. Offer alternative reasons to sell their items to you, consign them at your shop, donate them to your cause.)
• Give them justifications for getting rid of “perfectly-good” possessions (they really do need permission!)
• A simple, step-by-step way to tackle that big job of cleaning out.
• A selling message about your shop (after all, everyone’s a customer, even those with overloaded closets and cupboards!)

Then, before you produce your brochure,

check it for spelling, typos, awkward sentence structure. Better yet, have someone else check it (it’s hard to see one”s own mistakes, isn’t it? Happens to me all the time.) You don’t need to follow those 5th-grade grammar rules about incomplete sentences and dangling participles, but you do need to make it understandable.

Then give it to

a handful of honest, eagle-eyed and sharp-brained friends, customers, buddies for their opinion. Does it sound easy? Appealing? Lucrative? Does it present your business the way you’d like to be perceived? Are they all revved up to sort through their stuff?

Sound like too big a job? You have more pressing matters at the shop? You could simply

order the Customer Service Brochures Layout Idea Kit from Too Good to be Threw, which has this brochure and 8 others for $49. Heck, $49 is less than a half-hour’s for a graphic designer. That’s NINE different brochure ideas you can use as the starting point for your own Customer Service Brochures. You can even, if you wish, take the printed-out brochures directly to your local printer, ask that your shop logo, address, etc be pasted in, and order up as many as you like!

Past Weekend Warrior suggestions.