Well, I did it! I sold at my first Mom to Mom Sale this weekend. Apparently most who don’t live in Michigan may not know what a Mom to Mom Sale -often referred M2M- sales take place at churches, schools, or a few expo centers, table renters stack kids clothes sky high, with an occasional clothes rack here and there, sprinkled in with toys or other baby items they have collected through the years with kids. The sales are usually advertised throughout the community and also on the Mom to Mom sales for Michigan website. Often there is a door fee of $1 or $2 for buyers to come in and shop the tables, each seller prices their own items however much they want. (The biggest complaint I’ve heard from friends and fellow shoppers, most are overpriced!) Every now and then there are GOOD deals to be found, but similar to a garage sale it can be a hunt. The nice thing about M2M sales is you know there will be a ton of kid clothes and baby supplies if you’re a new mom, an expecting family member such as a Grandma -as my mom would say, “A lucky new Grandma!!”, or a close friend is having a baby.
Today, my day came…we were trying to decide if we were going to have another baby and if we did would it be another girl. I held onto EVERYTHING for the past 5 years waiting for this decision! So, I started my research and heard from friends they had some good success selling and buying at M2M sales and I began pulling totes upon totes from the attic. Calling my mom asking her to come help because I had no idea where to even begin really. This is how we started to separate and divide up all the clothes from my one little girl:
The sale that I was going into was labeled as Spring/Summer clothes. That helped a lot for a first timer to be able to focus on just one season. We piled in totes each size of warm weather clothes from birth to 6x!!! I had a small pile of very sentimental clothes that I just couldn’t part with yet. Then we took each size, one at a time, to verify the quality, any stains rips, or marks to make sure that we weren’t trying to make money off of junk. Once looked-over we began to make coordinating outfits within that size pile. This was a fun part!
Onto pricing…well that was a bit more difficult but so necessary and the whole reason for doing this work. After talking with friends who have done this, reading blogs with tips for good M2M sales, and my own sense of what I feel would be a good deal to move the clothes. Once we came up with a plan to group into 3 different categories, “Good, better, best” we then came up with a sticker system, 3 different colors and a specialty tag for higher items. I was worried that my stuff wouldn’t move, even though in GREAT condition. I just wanted to sell and get it out of my life. So I went with the highest everyday items at $3 and anything that was specialty was up at $6. Such as her first Daddy-Daughter dance dress! My mom on the other hand wanted to see higher prices on our stuff. I was very apprehensive just because I didn’t want to negotiate too much and I wanted my stuff to move, move, move.
Once pricing was over, I knew I wanted to be different and have my clothes all on a rack. I’ve never seen this done before at a M2M and most say that a rack is best but is not used often. A stack of pants on a table is the most common, yet most complained about. Or a bin marked “pajamas” to stand and dig through is another complaint. Knowing this, I asked my husband (who builds everything and anything) if he could think of a way to make a rack for 5 years worth of summer clothes from our peanut. This is what he created!!
The rack, the rack, the rack, was beautiful – well, you know, not looks wise, but functionality wise was stunning! I received so many compliments on it, how easy it was to see everything, and no one had to do any folding and refolding and refolding.
(I will post a picture of just the empty rack and a link for instructions on the build here)
We had each size separated with dividers marking the start and end of the group. I had heard bigger sizes go the fastest, which I was surprised by. I figured the cute, beautiful baby clothes women swoon over would go fast…nope! Seeing it first hand I was so wrong.
In my research I found a suggestion of how much change to start with in your pocket at the beginning of the sale, I went with $170 broken up into 50 1’s, 10 5’s, 5 10’s and 2 rolls of quarters ($20). I didn’t have any issues with change during the sale. My mom and I split it up between us so that buyers could go to either one of us to get their transaction done. It was smooth! We each wore an apron for fast cash and I wore a purse around to put my larger bills in so not to have too much loose in my pockets. My mom made her apron in 10 minutes and I used one I had from selling furniture and fun knick knacks at Peir1 during my college years.
It was nice to be able to work with my mom on this daunting task we had major laughs with each other, like being table number 1, chanting, “We’re number 1, we’re number 1!!” Me, semi-failing at group-work since being out of school for a while now freaking out that Mom was going to forget something super import for the project, like the PRICING GUIDE!
All in all I had a great first sale. I loved doing the research before hand and seeing all the stuff hung up and being way more organized than most in all of this. When I asked a friend for advice of how to do this she replied, ” Being organized, which I’m sure you are, is KEY”. I found out from talking to veteran sellers toys go fast, larger sizes fly off the tables – or racks! Buyers explained what is important to them when going to a M2M sale: (good quality) boy clothes are hard to come by, hanging clothes are best, shoes are a great deal, and clear prices are crucial.
In total I was at the sale for 5 hours the morning of, 2 hours the night before setting up my rack, and approximately 20 hours of prep/sorting/pricing time (not including my mom’s time or my husband building the rack). I sold about half of my summer clothes at this sale. Later finding out that the sale was not well advertised locally and community members were shocked when I posted it on a neighborhood Facebook page not knowing that it was happening without any type of sign. Apparently there are usually more buyers coming through this sale than there were today. I’m looking forward to the winter sale now that I have an idea of the flow of it all. I will be improving my price stickers and will update the post on how I do that. You can follow this link for the winter sale update.
I’ve done some thinking about how to improve the price tags. I was able to go to my local library where they have a die cutting machine available for patrons to use if they bring their own paper. Sure enough they had a die specifically for gift tags which had 3 separate tags for each punch.
I was then able to string on and tape to each outfit. I used tape so that I’m able to remove them to use for future Mom to Mom sales.
