Annie Adams, owner of the consignment shop Second Chic had no classroom experience to teach her the art of boutique. She worked retail for years, so, when the opportunity came in 2010 she spent $1,200 on a thrift store shopping spree, and opened up her first location on Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo.
Since that day, Adams has opened stores in Williamsville and in Hamburg, now in its sixth month. Adams credited her success to a deep desire of customers to wear and exchange recycled clothes as well as her talented staff at all three locations.
“The teams at all the stores are so good at working with customers,” Adams said. “We’ve got great consigners. We get the best stuff here at the store so when people do want to come and shop, it’s exciting every month for the customers to see what the consigners have brought in.”
Like many retail stores, Second Chic is hit by the winter months, but retains a wide audience across Western New York. “The three months, January, February, March, are all weather driven. If it’s a freezing day, Elmwood might not do very much business at all because nobody is parking and walking,” Adams said. “Williamsville might have a fine day because we have parking right out front.”
“If you’re in town for the holidays, this is kind of a stop for family members,” Kelly Cino, one of the team currently working in Hamburg. “They always end up saying, ‘Oh my god, we don’t have places like this where I’m from. This is amazing. I can’t believe the price!’ Everybody obsesses over the pricing, the special pieces you can’t find anywhere else. It’s definitely something we’ve seen happen a lot.”
“We get people from all over the place,” adds Dakota Follis-Ziarko, a long-time employee at the Elmwood location. “We get people who are like, ‘Oh, I drove an hour to get here!’ and we get people from Rochester who come in sometimes for us, too.” Both Adams and Follis-Ziarko said that word-of-mouth is the main reason for the store’s success. “Because there’s not a lot of consignment shops that are this big,” Follis-Ziarko said.
Social media also helps. Each of the locations has its own Instagram account where team members will put together styles and model them for the camera. High end items are put on Poshmark.com, an online platform to buy clothes.
“If something comes in that’s really high end like a pair of Chanel boots, they’ll have them in the store, but by having them also on Poshmark they get to a huge audience,” Adams said. “Not the whole store, but select a dozen pieces at a time.”
Right now all the teams are in their winter mode, accepting pants, jeans, cords, leather, long sleeve shirts and flannels, tall boots, winter skirts, winter jackets and coats. Items are accepted between the 5th to the 10th of each month. The split for consigners is 40 percent of the sale though after the first 30 days the prices are marked down 25 percent and after 60 days the price goes down to 50 percent.
“We love what we do and we just want to share fashion and recycling and sustainability and community with everyone,” Follis-Ziarko said. “It’s just a great business model and I feel like you’re constantly changing and molding your style why not just have a rotating closet with a business.”
SECOND CHIC
Area locations:
• 810 Elmwood Ave., Buffalo
• 5454 Main St., Williamsville
• 140 Pine St., Hamburg