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What I'm Doing Differently This Sale

Boutique For A Week loves and appreciates our Consignors! We want to take time this sale to provide ideas on how you can improve your experience. In today’s post, a past (and present) Consignor shares her plans on how to get a head start on tagging for our Spring Sale. As any Consignor knows, most of the work of consigning happens before our sale even starts. We hope this helps you in your preparations!

Every sale, I promise myself this will be the one.. the one where I am different. I’ll go through my stuff sooner and enter it efficiently into my inventory. I’ll check my supplies before I start trying to use them and only then realize I don’t have enough hangers or zip ties or safety pins. I’ll enter all my to-be-donated items in bulk so I can print them together instead of having to go through and re-read all the descriptions to know which ones to select.

I’ve done this exactly zero times.

I love Boutique For A Week. I enjoy volunteering, shopping, and consigning. The deals are wonderful and the money I earn consigning is always worth the effort I put into tagging. I just wish I was better about doing it all in a way that is less stressful to me. Each sale has taught me a lesson, but I want to finally put them all together. This sale is another chance for me to do that!

So what am I doing differently?

First, I am starting sooner. That means I have already started, but it would be just as true if I started only two weeks before the sale. I usually have a crazy week of tagging leading up to the Saturday night when item entry closes (FYI: Saturday, April 9th for the Spring 2016 Sale). Listen, that is a fine way to do things. Some people thrive under pressure or have less stuff to tag (and you can expect a blog post that week this sale to provide some last minute tips to motivate you through the mad dash at the end). I just want to avoid that this sale.

What does starting look like? For me, I sorted through ALL the clothes and pulled out what I plan on selling. I made a separate pile (so I don’t have to check them all again) of items that need ironing or stain removal. I didn’t make a separate donate pile because I plan to donate everything that doesn’t sell at the end of the sale. (Check out info on White Tag Consignors if you think you’ll be doing the same). If you plan on only donating some items, I encourage you to separate them and save yourself the time later. By the end of February, I plan to have all my clothing items on hangers, entered, and tagged (and stashed in my garage).

This past week, I went through our playroom. We keep all our toys in only two places: the playroom and the baby’s room. I went through the toys in the baby’s room before Christmas and pulled out what I wanted to sell. The big kids’ playroom was a bigger task. Side note: there is no toy as irresistible to your child as one in the sell pile (even if your child has NO clue that’s what you’re doing). I tried to do most of the work while my kids were asleep to avoid that issue. I have a stash of Boutique For A Week “to sell” stuff in my laundry room where those toys are hiding out until the sale.

I plan on tagging my toys and other non-clothing merchandise during Spring Break week in March. I still need to look through my house for remaining items to sell, using this blog post as my guide. I want to be done looking through everything before I do my second (hopefully final) round of tagging.

How well I accomplish these goals remains to be seen. At least this time I have a plan. Even if I wait now, I’m already ahead.

What do you do to help tagging go smoothly? The more ideas the better!