Steps needed to start consignment sale

[newtodis]

Good Morning!

Can anyone give me some steps, tips or hints on how to get a consignment sale up and running?? I've read about them quite a bit and would love to get one started in our area. Someone else has already said they will help organize the event with me - I just need to see how to get this off the ground without investing a lot of money - time I'm ok with.

TIA!

 

[The Mystery Machine]

What is a consignment sale as opposed to a garage sale?

 

[belle&beast]

I participate in consignment sales 2x per year. Ours is a spring/summer and fall/winter event. We sell baby/children's clothing, shoes, toys and accessories as well as maternity clothing. The way it works is each consigner pays $15 to participate and you hang and tag your own clothes given your consignor number, The tags are all done in the same manner on 3x5 index cards and are pinned to the item. The consigner gets 65% of the price and can decide whether or not an item can be discountd 50% on the last day of the sale. There is also an option to donate items that don't sell. She also offers options for consignors to work shifts at the sale in place of the consignor fee and has been bringing in vendors such as Tastefully Simple, Mary Kay, etc.

I think the biggest challenge was finding a place to hold the sale. This is run as a business, so it has to be done on commercial property. As of right now, we are able to hold it at our county fairgrounds in a large air conditioned building for a reasonable price.

I hope this helps! I have done really well and have purchased some great things for my kids as well. Keep in mind that she also only takes high quality items- department store or name brand and rejects stained clothing and toys without all the parts.

 

[Tooblessed]

We have two in our area, one on each side of town. Google them and then maybe call them, the best place for info is from the ones doing it.
My Kid's Closet Sale and Savvy Moms is the other one.

http://www.thesavvysale.com/
www.mykidsclosetsale.com

HTH

 

[lemondog]

OP, I started a children's consignment sale for our church last summer. We just had our 3rd (and most successful) sale yet!

To get the first sale off and running with a minimum of $$, we had to do a few things...

-Ask sellers to provide a rack for the sale. We also required all sellers that first sale to work.

-Offer a higher percentage to encourage people to sell with us (we give 80%, whereas most sales in the area give only 70%)

-Borrow, borrow, borrow! We borrowed the adding machines, cash boxes, rubbermaid bins, etc.

-Luckily for us, because we are a church ministry we had free use of our Fellowship Hall, plus all the tables and chairs. So luckily we had no expenses there.

-Homemade signs -- we bought some posterboard, made huge copies at Kinkos, pasted them to the posterboard, covered them in contact paper and affixed them to wooden stakes.

-Keep it small!!!! It can be overwhelming to have too many consignors, IMO. There are some sales around here with upwards of 1000 consignors. I can't even imagine trying to coordinate something like that. Not to mention I truly believe the quality of the items suffer. We had 29 consignors for our first sale, this fall we had 54. I think we will max out at 60. A) We don't have the space for more than that. And B) we already have a reputation of offering items in excellent condition, and I think a lot of that is because with so few consignors we can really control what goes in the sale. We also are a 1-day only sale.

Any other questions, just ask. Now that we just finished out 3rd sale we have had the money to build/purchase our own racks, adding machines, cash boxes, professional signs, etc. It has been a very profitable fundraiser for our mother's ministry and I have really enjoyed being in charge of it.

 

[newtodis]

Thank you all so much! I appreciate all of the tips! I need to start a list of things we would need for the first sale and get an idea on how to organize everything I think.