Twice is Nice: Children's Consignment Sale Mogul

Ten years ago, the word “consignment” didn’t mean anything to Jenifer Gifford. But when she had her first son (now 9), her friends insisted that she start shopping consignment sales for children’s items. She took their advice, and before she knew it, she’d built a business around that once unfamiliar word.

Today, Gifford, now a mother of two boys, runs Once Around the Block Kids, a consignment sale at West End Community Church that draws more than 1,200 shoppers three times a year. Each sale features the clothes, toys, equipment, and gear of 350 consignors, and there’s always a lengthy waiting list made up of others hoping to peddle their wares.

“Jen runs a different kind of sale,” says Danielle Hanrahan, who is Gifford’s lead volunteer. “She has very strict quality standards. Clothing isn’t accepted with holes, stains, or tears. The toys are clean and functioning. People go there because they know they are going to get quality merchandise.”

As sale organizer, Gifford brings in 30 percent of the sale price of each item. While a portion of that money goes toward rent, equipment, and advertising, Gifford admits it’s pretty good income for what she calls a “part-time, part-time job” (organizing each sale takes six weeks from start to finish).

She hasn’t stopped there, though. She’s also positioned herself as the area’s go-to consignment expert. She recently published a 196-page book (that Hanrahan edited) titled Consignamania — The How To Guide To Starting Your Own Seasonal Consignment  Business and launched a “boot camp” in which she charges prospective sale owners $299.95 to be her apprentice as she puts on a sale from beginning to end (limit two individuals per sale).

Like many “mompreneurs,” though, Gifford marvels at how she got here.

“It’s not at all where I expected to be,” she says. “I never thought about owning my own business, and being in consignment never crossed my mind.”

In fact, she thought she’d be producing records. Originally from California but living in Pennsylvania with her family, she moved to Nashville to study music business at Belmont University. Around that time, she also met her husband, and she says she quickly learned that the music business, with its long hours, late nights, and weekend work wasn’t exactly family-friendly.

“I needed to find something else to do because I knew that if I had children, I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom,” she says.

To make it possible for her to stay home, she and her husband wanted to get out of debt before they had kids. So, they did something a bit unconventional. They went to Tunica, where she became a cocktail waitress in one casino, and he became a bartender in another. In a year-and-a-half, they’d paid off their loans, and two months later, Gifford was pregnant, and the couple was back in Nashville.

“I’ve been a stay-at-home mom ever since,” she says.

Soon after her friends introduced her to consignment sales, she became not just a shopper, but a volunteer and a consignor. She’d buy items at garage sales and then resell them at consignment sales, making about $400 a sale to purchase various items for her boys.

“It became this little game, and then it smacked me in the face,” she says. “If I have 150 consignors, and I get 30 percent, that could quickly be some extra money that we didn’t currently have in our budget that we really needed.”

She cobbled together a $2,000 start-up fee through selling items on eBay and was fortunate enough to connect with a couple in Dickson who helped her learn more about organizing a sale. In 2005, after finding what she deemed the perfect location, she launched Once Around the Block Kids — which, at the end of July, held its 21st sale.
Although the sale has helped her family through some difficult financial times, at one point even serving as their sole source of income, Gifford says she didn’t just start it for the money. She’s passionate about giving back to her community. In fact, in 2008, she began turning all the proceeds of one of her three sales over to Rejoice Ministries, an organization that provides dance classes to inner city children from low-income families.
“I felt like God yanked me up from the back of my shirt and said, ‘Hey, you’re doing okay now. You need to get back on track,’” Gifford says. “I felt strongly that I was being led to actually turn over the sale.”

The feedback she gets from grateful shoppers and consignors who tell her how important the sales are to their families also makes her feel like she’s making a difference in people’s lives.

“For me, this business is a good way not only to help my family financially but to fulfill my need to be able to serve other people,” Gifford says, making her a stay-at-home mom juggling not just a family and a business, but also a calling.