Finding Inventory for Your Consignment Shop Startup

It takes a great deal of work to open a consignment store. One of the biggest items on your store-start up to do list is to get inventory. Not just refresher inventory, but a whole store's worth of inventory. From scratch. Before you ever open, because you want to have some really nice stuff to offer customers at the grand opening. All that PR and advertising, not to mention the one-time opportunity of a grand opening, needs to deliver a very big bang.

Fortunately there are a number of ways to get inventory, and you are actually better off if you get a little bit of merchandise through each tactic. The options range from cheap to expensive, easy to something that needs a bit of co-ordination.



Let's start with the least expensive, and the most often used way first: You get consigned goods before you open your store. This has some challenges, but it is possible to overcome them. For starters, you will need to advertise that your store is going to be opening soon, and that you are now taking consignments. This is tricky, because before you place the advertisement you must be 100% sure you are really going to open the store and go ahead with this business. Otherwise, you will have some very cranky consignors.

After you've gotten over the hump of assuring your consignors that your store is going to open, the next problem is where to put the items you have consigned. This brings up the second biggest challenge with this approach: Time. How soon before you open should you start taking consignments? A month is reasonable, but that means your consigors will have to wait a whole month before there's even a chance their stuff will sell, and you have to find a place to put their consignments for a whole month before you open. If you're selling clothes, its not too hard. But if you're selling furniture, you may have a problem.

This brings up the issue of starting your lease a month before you open your store. It will mean you pay an extra month's rent, but you are going to need that month to equip your store, both with consignments and to set up the store layout, decorations and more. And its going to be a busy month. Having consignors bring thier items into an actual store, not your house, will also help their confidence in you tremendously. So do the right thing and budget an extra month of rent into your startup budget.

After getting consignments, which should be at least half of your inventory, it is a good idea if you have some store-owned merchandise to sell. This can be new merchandise, or used. Many successful consignment stores do sell new items along with the used; it helps flesh out their inventory so customers have a good selection to pick from. Aim for maybe 20% of your inventory to be new if you want to go this route, but you should know that some stores have no new inventory at all (especially furniture stores) and do just fine.

This leaves us with the remaining chunk of inventory: store owned. Because you want to determine the feel of your store to a certain extent, you will want to have a small selection of items that are store inventory, not consignments. You can build this inventory through shopping garage sales, thrift-stores, eBay, estate sales and especially sample sales (if you live in a big enough city to have sample sales). Getting this inventory may take several months or more, and it will probably cost you at least $500, and that's if you are opening a very small, budget-minded shop. If you are opening a more upscale store that's even 500 square feet, think more in the range of $2500 to $5000. Happy shopping!

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