Alaska nonprofits have some unique fundraising tools at their disposal, like Pick.Click.Give. and pull tabs stores.
One local group is raising money through clothes. Curtain Call Consignment, in Kenai, has been a big source of revenue for the community theater group Kenai Performers since 2009. The idea came from board members Mary Krull and Kelly Keating-Griebel at one of the group’s annual meetings over a decade ago, according to Store Manager Tana Butler.
Butler — dressed head to toe in Curtain Call clothing Thursday — has been at the store since the start, and the Kenai Performers run in her family. Her mom played in the orchestra when she was a kid, and her daughter, Selia, has been in shows for years and has worked at the store, too.
Butler’s background is in nursing, not retail or fashion. But she said she and the other volunteers have learned the ropes along the way — how to price clothes and know what’s going to sell.
“The things that sell best are …” she paused, searching for the right word. “Casual. So, jeans, and anything that you could wear on a hike.”
Professional wear, not so much.
“Our blazer rack doesn’t see a lot of activity,” she said, laughing. “If we had to get smaller, the blazer rack would go, first.”
Consignors bring gently worn clothes into the store when they no longer want them, and Curtain Call volunteers decide if they'll take the clothes or not.
Butler estimated they accept about half of what comes in.
“We try to take things that have been purchased in the last three years, or are really vintage or quirky or super fun or really loud or sassy or sparkly,” she said.
The ones they do take are marked down from their original pricetags.
“And when the item sells, it is 50% to them, the consigner, and 50% to us,” Butler said. “And then we just try to do it as cost efficiently as possible, and then it goes into Kenai Performers' coffers and we get to do things like buy scripts … and lights and props and chairs and dancefloors,” — and all those other costs that go into running, and growing, a theater. The Kenai Performers bought a space in 2021 that today houses its black box stage.
After 90 days, the clothes that don’t sell are donated, elsewhere.
Today, Curtain Call is housed in the Seaman Building, on Frontage Road in Kenai. It’s the boutique’s third storefront. (One Kenai location shuttered a decade ago after a driver drove his car into the front of the store.)
One constant is the support it's been to the nonprofit organization, especially during leaner years.
The store has come in handy when the theater hasn’t been able to make as much through ticket sales or its summer drama camps, like during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It’s just a consistent background source,” Butler said. “And the community very much supports it. Especially when we started, there were very few clothing stores, besides Fred Meyer, even in town.”
But she said it’s still going strong, even in the age of online shopping. Butler said consigners will often bring things into the store instead of sending them back to online retailers like Poshmark.
“In our community, of course, you have to order a lot of things,” she said. “And then it gets here, and it doesn’t fit. So that happens a lot. We benefit from it being expensive to ship things back.”
And she said not only does that mean more money for the store — it’s also a better alternative to things ending up in the trash.
