Policy Updates and Pricing Transparency
Almost 3.5 years ago, Colchuck Consignment launched in an 8’x20’ tiny house as a big idea with a rudimentary website. While our website hasn’t improved much, the business has grown in ways we could only have imagined. The shop now lives in a 2000 square foot building, filled to the brim with great gear and apparel, rental items, a repair center, and where many community events take place each month. Throughout the past 3.5 years, we’ve worked hard to refine, fine tune, simplify, and streamline all the processes involved in a highly dynamic business. We’ve recently made a few changes to our policies that we hope will get us closer to the fully dialed in consignment shop that we strive to be! Below we will detail our recent updates. With these updates comes a revised consignor contract, which all consignors will be asked to sign at their next visit.
Contract Length
All items coming in to the shop will have 90 days to sell. This differs from our previous policy, which would determine contract length based on when in the season an item came in (1-5 months depending on how much time was left in the season). The old system was clunky and made it difficult to determine when your item would expire. The new system is much more straightforward and easy to follow. We are still using an auto-aging system, which drops the price of your item 10% every 30 days to help move it along.
Once the contract ends, there is a 10 day period before the item expires. Once the item expires, consignors have 10 days to reclaim their item before it becomes store property. If not reclaimed, it can be sold as store inventory, donated to a local thrift store or organization, or donated to our repair materials to be used for fixing other items.
Payout Scale
The next change we’ve made is to our payout scale. We have slightly shifted the brackets for each payout percentage. Our rates remain better than industry standard. They are now as follows:
Consignor Credit Boost
We have clarified our consignor credit boost policy. When spending your FULL consignor credit balance in store, you will receive a 10% bump on your credit. For example, if you have $50 in your account and spend $50+ in your purchase transaction, you will get $55 to spend on that transaction. Previously, you received 10% on each transaction that used consignor credit (either 10% off or 10% bump on credit depending on credit vs. transaction amount).
As a business with very small margins, this was simply becoming unsustainable. The discounts come out of the store’s cut on the transaction making our margins too narrow to continue this practice on all transactions using consignor credit. Many shops’ payout percentages refer to the amount you get if you spend your credit in store, and cashing out results in a 10% cut to the cash out amount. So not only are our rates better than industry standard, there is no ding for cashing out your account AND you get an additional boost when you spend your full balance in store, a win for all consignors!
Brand List and Niching Down
We have compiled a thorough list of accepted brands that we will consult while going through incoming consignment. We will only accept items from brands on this list, and being on this list does not guarantee acceptance. We are doing our best to curate a store full of high quality items, from brands with proven track records that will stand the test of time.
We are thrilled to see so many new options for shopping used in our valley. As more of these options continue to crop up, we will be niching down and truly focusing on our lane- outdoor adventure gear and apparel. Be sure to check out these shops for other used apparel and goods:
Dandelion: Children’s apparel. Coming soon to Side Street Cashmere
On The Ave: Women’s fashion boutique. Cashmere
Eastside Rebuild: Reclaimed building material store and tool library. Cashmere
383 Threads: Curated second hand fashion. Wenatchee
Das Thrift House: Clothing, household items, and other treasures. Just remodeled and expanded hours. Leavenworth
While these policy changes may sound like a lot, the changes we have made are relatively minor in the grand scheme of things and will help create long term sustainability for the business.
Pricing Transparency
In addition to the aforementioned policy updates, we have also refined our pricing formula to be more transparent. Pricing starts by finding the original listed price and taking 30% of that to find our base price. From there the price goes up or down 10% based on a variety of factors such as condition, demand, and age. As a reminder, if you have a target price, please let us know at the time of drop off and we will let you know if we can meet it, or suggest another selling platform where you may be more likely to meet your price.
Consignors are the life of our business! Without consignor’s bringing their high quality gear to the shop to find new users, Colchuck Consignment would fall flat, and many in our community would lose access to the outdoors by being priced out of affordable gear. We hope you understand that our policy changes are made in the interest of keeping the consignment process smooth, hassle free, and sustainable for everyone. We appreciate you and thank you for your continued support.
