Auntie Kate The Resale Expert

The program was part of a September 2016 competition that was featured in local TV and which won a national award.

Consignment and resale shopkeepers often dream of having interns from local schools lend them a hand in their shops. But the logistics can be baffling.

Kristi Hickey and husband/ business partner David, owners of the 28,000 sq.ft. Consign to Design in Knoxville TN,  found a way to not only get some energy in their shop with design students’ ideas, but have turned it into an award-winning event with the help of the local Interior Design Society.

Double Kudos to Kristi for thinking of the idea of involving local designers (who performed as gophers for the students during the 2-hour design challenge) as well as design students (who might become valuable employees as a result of the interaction), and also using an aspect of popular culture as her inspiration for the event with a time-constrained competition.

“I love HGTV, that’s how I got the idea of a design challenge,” she said.

See all the smart stuff rolled into one simple event? Helping young people gain some real-life experience, giving back to the community by providing shop resources to students, garnering media attention, and snapping the resulting vignettes and using them for Facebook posts (take a look, too, at how Kristi captioned each of her photos with image-building captions). In addition, Kristi endeared her business to participants’ family and friends and built an archive of graphics for future use… and snazzed up the store with the students’ creations… at least until the wonderful results were snapped up by shoppers! Not to mention introducing her business, perhaps for the first time, to local interior design professionals and taking a first-hand look at the work ethics and personalities of some potential part-time employees.

Consider, too, that Kristi would perhaps not have been able to pull this together if she had not been an active member of her local interior design professional group.

Read the whole article. (And notice that it was picked up by USA Today Network.)