Auntie Kate The Resale Expert

If you started off on the wrong foot, if you’ve gone off on the wrong fork in the road, if you’ve been barking up the wrong tree, how are you going to get back on your business back on track and

how can you have your customers, your clients, your suppliers, your donors behind you, rooting for that change?

Now, there are different reasons why you might want to make a significant change in your consignment, resale or thrift shop. The first of course, is you misjudged your market somehow. The second one is that the market actually changed on you. You may have opened six months ago, you may have opened six years ago or 16 years ago, but your market somehow has changed. So you’re going to have to make a change in the way you run your business. And the third reason that you might want to be looking at changing is because you yourself have changed.

So let’s talk about change, why you need to do it, how are you going to do it, and how you’re going to get everybody on your side when you do it.

Now, the first: misjudging your market. That’s easy to do. What actually made me start thinking about this topic is the fact that Twitter changed from being 140 characters long to 280 characters long in November of 2017. They reported that, believe it or not, their average tweet has not changed. Their average tweet is only 50 characters. Was 50 before they changed from 140 to 280. And is still 50… but business is significantly up at Twitter.

And that’s because they took something that was a little bit difficult, kinda hard to make sure you were only doing 140 characters and they actually simplified things, clarified things, made things easier to do. So Twitter removed the parameters that were confusing people.

For an example, for the resale market, perhaps you opened a consignment shop for children and you decided you were going to carry everything from preemies all the way on up to size fourteens. Then you realized after that six months or six years that sizes above about a size eight weren’t very profitable. So now you have to change and you have to tell people that you’re only going to take up to size eight. So that’s an example of having misjudged your market and adjusting it so that your business is better.

The second reason that you’d have to do a change in your business is at the market itself changed. And this actually happened to me when I opened my store. I was in this solid middle class, blue collar neighborhood of families looking for bargains, families concerned with price more than anything else. Over the years as I was in that market, the actual neighborhood changed. It became more gentrified. It became more important for people to have some aspirations, to buy more designer items, so I actually had to change my merchandise mix because my neighborhood changed. It was nothing that I had changed.

The third reason that you might want to make a change in your business is because you yourself have changed. I was blessed for the first 9 years of my store to have the same people working for me, full timers, a very dedicated staff. Within the course of three or six months, I lost all of them. In addition to having moved to double the size, a space which was costing me double!

So I changed and I decided that I never wanted to be dependent upon staff quite that much. So I changed my hours considerably…because I had changed. Another example would be if you are growing and you have all of a sudden instead of having two or three staffers, you have eight or 10 and you need to institute some guidelines so that everybody does things the way you want them to do. That’s a reason to change because of your outlook on life.

Now you’re thinking, great, but nobody likes change. So how am I going to announce a change and how am I going to keep my staff and my customers and my suppliers behind me as I make these changes? Well, the first thing you need to do is not approach, not identify, not announce this as a change, but rather announce it as a WIIFM: a “what’s in it for me”.

So for instance, when I decided that I no longer could do intake on demand because my store was double the size and I lost all my staffers, I switched to a system where if you were consigning you needed to have an appointment. That was a big horrible switch for my people who were used to nine and a half years of coming in whenever they wanted to. So what I did is I instituted what you now call the drop and run system where the only people who actually needed an appointment were first timers so that I could spend some time with them, and everybody else could use a structured significant drop and run system. So I announced it as, guess what? You no longer have to stand in line and wait for Kate to checking your items. You can drop them off and get on your way. I didn’t say you have to have an appointment. I said, no more waiting. That’s the what’s in it for me benefit.

The important lesson to learn is that just like Twitter, who lessened the confusion and the concerns and made using their service more comfortable, you could do something. For instance, a lot of consignment shops have the rule that we will take anything anytime… up to half an hour before closing. Now I know you set that so that you wouldn’t have somebody come in three minutes before closing with 15 minutes of work for you. But think about it: if you eliminated that half hour deadline, how many people would take advantage of it anyway? And they would be so much more comfortable and it will be so much less confusing with just bring things in, whenever we’re open.

Now, I think the main reason probably that you might want to change things are that you now have policies that are no longer applicable, policies that worked when you were less experienced, policies that worked when you only had a single part-timer, things that really do not apply to you now. Things that don’t apply to the way you run your business, things that don’t apply to the world at large. And of course, things that you learn better not to do. But you’re worrying about the change and not making it… which isn’t doing your bottom line any favors.

So changing your store and keeping your fan base happy? Present it in a way that they feel they’re getting something wonderful… a WIIFM they’ll adore!