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Pop-Up Shop Excitement and Baby Clothes!

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It is crazy that I have only a few weeks left at the Seton Store. I've had such an amazing experience creating new relationships and developing new skills. Before I came to the store, I had never had any retail experience, and never expected to find myself working in clothing store, especially a thrift store. But this has provided me with the most unique service I have ever done, and has made me learn to appreciate my college town and all of it's quirks a little bit more. It seems like everything seemed so far in the future when we first began, but now, here we are one week away from the sale and three weeks away from our last day. I think what I will miss the most will be the employees. We spend all day in the back cracking jokes and telling stories. All of the employees have welcomed us with open arms and have been patient, understanding, and helpful since the beginning.  This week, we've been putting in work to get our items ready for the sale. We've been looking for...
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'Tis The Season

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 Don't worry- Christmas prep is still occurring at the Seton Store! This week, we've been surrounded in Christmas. We've been helping to get items prepared to go onto the floor in the upcoming weeks. We are doing this by going through the 25+ boxes of Christmas items and separating them into four groups. We did this because we have four different colored tags that correlate with the weeks, so we wanted to make the boxes be accessible for those weeks and ready to hit the floor. Today, Kaitlyn and I had a very exciting day with a field trip! We were supposed to be wrapping a board with wrapping paper like a Christmas gift, but we did not have wrapping paper for it. We went to dollar general and then to dollar tree to find wrapping paper. It was so fun to go on an adventure and was a good break during our day.          Our pop-up shop is rapidly approaching! When I first had this idea, I did not expect it to go so far as to actually occur. But now, we have the...
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Christmas Takeover

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       Hi guys! I had another fun and productive week at the Seton Store. On Wednesday, I was able to do Jewelry again which was exciting because I hadn't worked with jewelry since the incident from a previous blog post. I am not pricing the jewelry now, which is fair, but I spent a majority of my day on Wednesday tagging the jewelry and reorganizing so it is more accessible when we need to restock that section. I included an older picture of the necklaces in this blog because I forgot to get a newer picture. It was the same premise though, you can see that all of the necklaces get hung together with clips on a clothes hanger. This allows the necklaces to get tangled as little as possible.            Now onto the Christmas stuff... We have a lot of Christmas products so we have been working to get as much on the floor as possible. It looks like the Seton Store is almost exclusively a Christmas store because there are now two shelves...
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The Giving Tree

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This week, me and Kaitlyn helped to set up and create the Giving Tree the Seton Center runs every year. The premise is that all the tags on the tree represent things we are accepting as donations for a charity. On Tuesday, me and Kaitlyn set up the tree (almost all by ourselves..), which was a big undertaking and took us quite some time. On Wednesday, I wrote on all the ornaments the items that we were collecting for donations. Those items were gloves, scarves, throw blankets, adult coloring books, hats, hoodies, and sweatshirts. I loved walking into the store and seeing my handwriting on the tree the next day because I can physically see my impact on the store.      I was writing last week about how I hoped that we would consider donating some of our surplus of items such as gloves, hats, and scarves. Hearing about the Giving Tree program this week seemed like an answer to my post from last week. Knowing that we do actually contribute and help put on a drive fo...
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Winter is Coming!

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       This week, I spent time organizing the winter supplies such as hats, gloves, and scarves. There were at least 5 boxes filled with different winter clothes. I rearranged it for quicker access and resupplying and separated them into different boxes for gloves, hats, and scarves. This is the first time I've seen a big surplus of a certain item because we had so many scarves. While I was doing this, I was thinking about how we have so much of these items and a low demand, and I was wondering if there would be a place that these items would be more beneficial, such as at a homeless shelter. I know these are very much in demand for the homeless population, and while it is beneficial to offer these at a low price at our store, it could be more helpful to donate at least some of our supply to shelters. We donate a lot to the Frederick Rescue Mission, so I think it would be very helpful if we were able to donate some of our hats, gloves, and scarves to them. Organizing...
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Trouble in Paradise

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       I spent what looks to be my last week in jewelry tagging, sorting, and pricing (this part is important!) different pieces. I had an interesting experience on Wednesday that reminded me that service is not always easy, and we do make mistakes. It started off as my days normally do, grabbing a big clump of tangled necklaces and beginning detangling. There was a new volunteer who came in for the first time and she was working on jewelry with me. We talked a lot about everything from school to her job and to her hobbies, one of which is selling items on Ebay. She collected a little pile of jewelry and asked if I could price three of the items for her, which I am able to do and have been doing. She wanted what looked to me like broken jewelry; a bracelet missing a charm, a necklace with no clasp, and a small metal whistle. I priced it cheaply because I assumed the pieces would not have sold otherwise, she was presenting them as such, and I was trying to be kind bei...
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Accessorizing the Seton Store

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     Another week down! We spent a lot of this week working on pricing, sorting, and organizing jewelry. It is very interesting how as we get more comfortable, we get more responsibility, and the workers seem to be trusting us more with tasks. I was nervous to start pricing because I did not want to mess up or under/over price things. However, I’ve been able to recognize quality jewelry and find out appropriate prices for items.  I found a pearl necklace today in a bin of jewelry and recognized that it may be high quality. After some research, I found out that it was a vintage and expensive piece and retails for $200-300. The workers let me walk through the process of selling expensive jewelry including writing up a description on the computer and printing it out.  The workers even trust us to create out own jewelry out of broken items. Today, I made two pairs of earrings out of broken necklaces. I think it is so cool that we are able to sell items that I made m...
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