Selling my sister's wardrobe - Market preparation

My sister arrived at my house a few weeks after we had decluttered her wardrobe a second time. Although we were almost ready to hold our stall there was still so much to do!

The focus of this session was preparing for the actual day. I had added a handful of items to my sister’s clothes so we had our stock, now we had to make it into something cohesive and manageable.
I had spent some time researching selling clothes secondhand and had learned about how to approach pricing, stall setup, and presentation. Like any new topic, details quickly become complex and you fall into a whole new world you never knew existed before! Armed with this knowledge, we chatted about the preparation as we worked.

We started by sorting items into sizes. As we went a few high quality and brand new with tags items went into a separate pile as they would have higher prices than the rest. We had borrowed and purchased secondhand a few portable clothes racks and gathered all the spare hangers in my house. We started at the smallest size, hanging or folding as needed, and talked about what price we thought should go on the items.

What we ended up with was sections sorted by price and by size. We had one rack for about $5-$15 and a larger rack for $20-$30 items and the higher priced section. The remainder of accessories and very cheap items we planned to set out on a table and basket. Now we had the clothes organised, the next step was the presentation.

With reuse top of mind, I brought together all my coloured cardboard, pens, scissors and safety pins. We got busy making bright signs with our prices and commonly used market terms, and we worked on individual price tags for the high quality items. Although we had been having fun the whole time, this part of the preparation was the most fun! We got to play with words and colours, and used our neatest handwriting. 

We tried to be realistic with what people would pay for second hand items and being in this mostly for fun, we decided we would be open to all offers. Not having done this before we prepped some extra signage to use in case we wanted to halve our stall prices or similar. My research beforehand had taught me that the secondhand clothes market is a pretty tough place to make money, as people do not value clothes like they used to. More on those observations and more in the next and final post in this series - the stall results!

The last step for this day was to actually book the stall! We picked a date about a month later, at a time of year we figured would be reasonably mild so cold or heat wouldn’t drive people off. The pandemic was a factor in our thinking too, it was a Covid-safe event but another month out from lockdowns and clusters would help people feel more comfortable to come out and shop sustainably.

We packed up all our market goodies and eagerly awaited for the market stall weekend to arrive...