Starting a Consignment Store: Alexandria's Story

Starting a Consignment Store: A True Triumph Story

Alexandria Keener Hammond started her consignment business at 19 while in college for computer and information sciences, with a major in new media, design and production. She managed to take her store My Girlfriend's Wardrobe from an online store in 2012 and make it into a successful brick-and-mortar in downtown York, PA. And she did it without accumulating any significant debt: "I have done two small Square loans, back in the day. And those were paid back very quickly." Besides that, "I don't like debt. I don't have business debt." Starting a consignment store is an accomplishment; starting it at 19 is a feat.

To build her business, Alexandria has worked at a relentless pace and summoned more than a decade of grit to claim her space in the industry.

Never Off

“How many hours were you working,” I asked her. She says at her busiest times, “I was never off.” That sounds daunting for most of us, but for Alexandria, “Stopping was never a thought that crossed my mind.” It’s that kind of resolve that helped her establish a successful store with zero debt at the age of 32. 

Here, we uncover a lot of wisdom and savvy for running a resale store as we dive into the trials she faced and the hard-won solutions she found to overcome the obstacles she faced.

The mobile trailer that My Girlfriend's Wardrobe used for pop-up events

The Early Days: Be Crazy

“My mom said, why don’t we start the consignment store online? But this was 2012; it’s hard to imagine, but online shopping really wasn’t a huge thing yet. So I looked at her and said, ‘You’re crazy.’ But she was right.” 

In the beginning, the store was only online. Inventory was shipped in and shipped out. Most of the inventory came from Alexandria and her mom’s personal collections—”I’ve always loved shopping,” she says. Soon, inventory started coming in from some friends and family, but also by Alexandria’s cold-calling efforts. “I would email people from their Craigslist postings… even people out of state. I got more no’s than yes’s early on.” 

Don't Be Afraid of Rejection

This kind of effort exemplifies Alexandria’s go-getter nature. No’s are something that might scare us or make us feel awkward, but being able to take rejection on the nose and keep moving forward is crucial for starting businesses. Not only can these efforts make or break a business, they can also end up being a differentiating factor. For Alexandria, emailing out of state diversified her inventory: “JCrews don’t all get the same things. California JCrews have a different inventory than Pennsylvania JCrews.” Alexandria’s willingness to get rejected or ignored turned into a valuable, innovative quality. Her store now held more unique inventory than competing businesses. Soon, the small collection grew and became a stack of tubs resting against the kitchen wall.

These initial moves to do something unconventional like starting an online consignment store, and cold emailing Craigslisters from out of state, are not incidental to success. Entrepreneurs and small business owners must be willing to be crazy to make things happen.

The Mobile Store: Experiment and Observe

Within six months of starting the store, Alexandria and her mother bought a thirty-foot trailer and started selling at vendor malls. “It was actually a camper that we had renovated and turned into a mobile store.” This stage was defined by strategy experiments—throwing as much spaghetti at the wall as possible and doubling down on what worked. These kinds of habits, like inventory categorization and analysis, are easier and more effective when done from the start. Through it, she discovered a number of principles that were essential for her store’s growth. Alexandria credits three practices in particular.

Be Consistent

Consistency, No Matter What - "That's actually one of the things that we get the most compliments on these days is how reliable and consistent we are to our customers and our consignors."

Alexandria attributes her store’s consistency as one of, if not the most important factors leading to its eventual success. This practice began in the mobile-store days when they kept regular business hours on Fridays for inventory dropoff. Customers could rely on My Girlfriend’s Wardrobe to be ready to receive their pre-loved fashion. But since then, it has spread to almost every aspect of the store: social media, images and design across the website/social media, consignor agreements, and even store hours: “If our hours are 10 to 6 on Wednesdays, the store's open 10 to 6. Unless there's a, you know, three feet of snow on the ground, and I legitimately cannot get to the business. The store is open. Period."

Alexandria posts daily on Instagram to show the store's new inventory

This repeated consistency impresses on consignors and customers reliability and loyalty—everyone knows they can expect quality interactions and service with My Girlfriend’s Wardrobe. Additionally, this consistency reduces the friction between the store and the consignors/customers. They do not need to check if the store is open, they know the hours. They do not need to double-check how the consigning process works, because it’s the same every time. Everyone wants convenience; if your store is convenient, people will visit.

Be Transparent 

Transparency - “We also try to be very transparent with people. Our website gives people a really good idea of what they can expect items to be priced at before they even bring them to us.”

Consistency, paired with transparency, extends to pricing and consignment expectations. Alexandria ensures that her website clearly communicates terms and pricing so customers and consignors know what to expect. This is increasingly important as app-based consignment like Thredup threatens to draw more and more consignors away from storefronts. If your consignment process is convenient and transparent, the short drive to your store is going be easier than all the steps that go into self-consigning apps. 

Use Data

Data-Driven Inventory Decisions- “Watching our numbers... what categories are selling, what brands are selling the best... Get rid of the brands that are selling the worst.”

One of Alexandria’s more profitable tactics has been to keep a close watch on inventory sell-through rates—that is, to understand which kinds of items are selling better than others. She then focuses on acquiring those specific kinds of items while rejecting other kinds of inventory. For example, if Gap brand inventory was selling quickly, she would prioritize acquiring Gap clothing (though My Girlfriend’s Wardrobe has moved more in the direction of luxury items). 

This data-driven process is a win for the consignors, the store, and the customers as each gets more of what they want; it can be an annoyance to consignors if their items don't sell, it can put off customers if you never have items they like, and you take up intake-time and valuable space in your shop with “dead” stock. 

Alexandria and her husband in front of My Girlfriend's Wardrobe in York, PA

Breakthrough: Opening the Storefront

After about a year, Alexandria was able to establish a storefront. True to her scrappy spirit, she kept costs to a minimum: her mother fronted the initial month’s rent and she enlisted her grandfather to help give the space a facelift—”just a fresh coat of paint, new carpeting at the entrance, and a reconfiguration of the existing counter.” With a permanent space, inventory transportation was a worry of the past and she could focus on streamlining her store system (she was still taking college classes, by the way!). 

Focuses for the Future

Alexandria has had a continual focus on improvement; those improvements gathered speed and clarity. While there are many to choose from, two stand out for her: a financial discipline called “Profit First,” and data-driven inventory decisions. I asked Alexandria, “If you could go back ten years and give yourself business advice, what would it be?” She said, “Have multiple bank accounts.” This was a surprising answer.

Profit First

Essentially, the core philosophy flips the traditional accounting formula of Sales - Expenses = Profit to Sales - Profit = Expenses. This approach encourages businesses to allocate a portion of their revenue to profit first and then manage the remaining funds for expenses, which fosters financial discipline and ensures a focus on profitability from the start. Put simply, it focuses all business decisions on one task first: make a profit. 

It also states that businesses should have separate bank accounts for separate purposes, e.g. an income account, a profit account, a tax account. This is similar to the Dave Ramsey envelope system, where you budget cash into different envelopes ($400 for groceries) at the beginning of the month. In both of these systems, there is a greater level of intention in money management, which fosters responsibility and accurate tracking. 

Data-Driven Inventory Decisions

Lastly, a recent practice of Alexandria’s has been data-driven inventory decisions, as mentioned previously. We return to it again because of its disproportionate impact on improving the quality of a consignment store. At the end of the day, a resale or consignment store is about inventory—getting and selling what people want. If you don’t have what they want, people will not shop. If you have what they want, people will shop. Besides polling every customer that walks through your store, the best way to understand what people want is to analyze what they buy. Or, as Alexandria says, obsessing over sell-through rates. 

Inventory Insights

Tracking inventory sell-through rates is challenging without a software; it's one of the reasons she switched to ConsignCloud: "Switching to ConsignCloud has given me so much time back… It's also taken off a lot of mental load. While her primary reason for switching was the Shopify and Square integrations, ConsignCloud also provides this data with a tool called Inventory Insights. It's a powerful tool that helps business owners determine how their inventory is performing by analyzing sales across multiple categories, such as product type, brand, and size. By understanding which items are moving quickly and which are not, owners can make informed decisions about restocking, discounting, and removing products that are underperforming.

View performance by category, consignor, custom tag, etc.

Inventory Insights allows store owners to track metrics like sell-through rates, which help identify the effectiveness of each product category. This means you can see what your customers are buying most often and adapt your inventory accordingly. For Alexandria, this has been crucial. By tracking her inventory with insights, she was able to make data-driven decisions, like cutting over 300 brands from her inventory earlier this year. This action ultimately led to a 20% increase in her store-wide sell-through rate.

The usefulness of Inventory Insights cannot be overstated—it helps business owners avoid keeping stagnant inventory that takes up valuable space and cash. Instead, owners can focus on the products that are in demand and align their offerings with what customers want. By relying on inventory data, Alexandria could identify the brands and sizes her customers were most interested in, which directly contributed to the profitability and growth of her store.

Incorporating Inventory Insights into your business practices can lead to more efficient inventory management, reduced costs, and improved profitability. Alexandria's journey is a prime example of how paying close attention to inventory data and making strategic, informed decisions can make a significant impact. Her success wasn't just about determination and hard work; it was also about leveraging strategies like consistency, transparency, and data-driven insights to ensure her business stayed aligned with market demands and customer preferences.

Alexandria running the sales counter at her brick-and-mortar store

Now It's Your Turn: Be Crazy

Alexandria Keener Hammond's journey from a college startup to a thriving consignment store is a testament to the power of determination, experimentation, and smart tools. Her willingness to embrace unconventional strategies, her relentless consistency, and her data-driven approach have turned My Girlfriend's Wardrobe into a beacon of success for resale entrepreneurs. By leveraging a camper as a mobile store and strategically utilizing ConsignCloud's Inventory Insights, Alexandria has demonstrated that combining grit with the right technology can fuel remarkable growth.

If you're ready to take your consignment store to the next level, why not see how ConsignCloud can help you make smarter inventory decisions and streamline your operations? Try ConsignCloud today and give your business the tools it needs to thrive.