Consign This- July 2, 2014
I like kids consignment stores and consignment events for yuppie designer brands that I don’t want to spend all my money on, but for some reason love to put on my children for the two weeks they can wear them. My favorite find, ever? This never-worn Lilly Pulitzer dress. It remains my favorite Lilly of all time. Charlotte was Henry’s age (approximately 7 months) in this picture. I picked the color to go with her eyes. Gah! My beautiful baby girl! I love these.
Alas, she is not a baby anymore. My first-born is a clever, active and growing preschooler with storage bins of organized infant and toddler clothes piling up in her closet. Last week I decided to try my hand at some local consignment shops to offload some adorable stuff. I saved some special items for posterity or my sister if her next baby is a girl.
Washing, repacking and taking these clothes to the store was more emotional than I had anticipated. Greyson and I had a moment as I sorted and inspected each item. Giving up those tiny garments was symbolic of her baby days being long gone. It was partly an admission that I may be done having babies. I’m done right? I’m not having anymore children…right?
But, I got over it. Time marches on. They’re just clothes. I have the photos and the memories. Let’s get down to business.
The business of consigning took for freakin’ ever! Thankfully the women at the store helped me unload. They warned me they weren’t taking too many items under size 24 months or 2T because they get so much baby stuff. Okay, but I had crazy-awesome stuff that my child looked ADORABLE in and anyone would want to have, so I was good, right? An hour or so later I went back to the shop to find out how I was gonna make it rain with all the mad money I was sure to get for my baller baby clothes.
I got $41 dollars for maybe a sixth of all this:
Okay. No worries. This shop wasn’t taking baby stuff. Off to the next one! Two hours of my life, running out of gas in a nearby parking lot, and driving a town away was all it cost me to get $7.41. This store told me I “had a lot of stains.” Seriously?! That microscopic spit-up dot on a name-brand onesie means I get no money?! Trust me. I did not try to consign the things with the real stains. I had stuff that looked like my kid had worn it while running through the sewer before butchering some meat. I have bought some things with a tiny stain or itty-bitty hole or snag in the fabric. No biggie. It’s pre-owned. I get it, but 7 bucks? Screw this! I’m keeping the rest of her clothes and not ruling out a third kid to put in them. Well, maybe. Nah, I’m done. I’ll just donate it. I’d go with Craig’s List or eBay, but if that’s as much effort as this was, forget it.
Spread it around:
You should try selling at Kids Everywear (http://www.kidseverywear.com/). It does take time to hang and label everything, but you’ll get way more than $7. Plus you bring back home what doesn’t sell and try to re-sell it next time. I both sell and shop here and have had nothing but good experiences. There are lots of these type of bi-annual sales in the area (but Kids Everwear is my favorite).
Have a garage sale! Or find a local fb group for selling stuff. That’s how I unload!
Kid to Kid is my go-to. That and yard sales. Not to post-plug on your blog, but I wrote about my resale adventures a couple of weeks ago. http://www.sportformyneighbors.com/junk-in-my-trunk/
Also, I did what you did the first time I attempted resale. I took every tub of old crap that I had to the store. I quickly learned that the stores seasonally add to their inventory. So now, I clean out one season and hold it in a tub in the attic until my reseller of choice (Kid to Kid) announces that they’re taking that season’s clothes. They start taking Fall and Winter clothes in August and Summer and Spring clothes in March, I think. As soon as they start taking, I haul my stuff down because if you get there when they first start taking that season, you don’t get them saying, “We aren’t taking these sizes, etc.” Also, my big mistake the first time wasn’t running the clothes through the wash before I took them. My reasoning was, they were washed before I stored them in the tub, so they should be fine. If you wash and dry them and lay them flat, not folded in the tub, I’ve found that the stores buy a lot more. That being said, there’s always clothing that they don’t take and I’m like, “What the Hell was wrong with this???” But remember, you aren’t doing it to make a lot of money. You’re doing it to make a little money where with donating or throwing away, you’d make none for almost the same amount of work. BUT it is a pain in the ass, without a doubt.