WICHITA — The economy is keeping some people from opening new businesses, but Dooz Pankratz and Maureen Morrison say the time is right for their Remarkable Consignment, a new women’s clothing and furniture shop coming to Central and Rock on July 8.
“It’s remarkable items that have been remarked,” Pankratz says.
She’s the former director of marketing and business development for Legasus Group.
Morrison briefly was a family business advisor there.
She says Legasus “just was not a good fit.”
Morrison started thinking about a consignment shop when a friend of hers wanted to sell some furniture she’d had only a few years. She didn’t want to have a garage sale, so she hired an auction company.
“What if you had a consignment store that would take that kind of furniture?” Morrison thought.
She and Pankratz started talking.
Pankratz previously was in retail for 25 years “and had the bug and needed to go back in again.”
“There’s just a certain pace to retail that I love,” she says.
Still, Pankratz wasn’t sure about opening the store. She called her uncle and said, “Talk me out of this.”
Pankratz asked him to tell her every reason she shouldn’t do it.
“He said, ‘No, I’m going to tell you every reason why you should do this.’ ”
One reason is that consignment stores are hot nationally right now, Pankratz and Morrison say.
“It’s just exploding across the country,” Morrison says. “With the economy the way it is, they’re doing, like, twice as much business as they were a year ago.”
Remarkable Consignment could add additional lines, such as men’s clothing, if customers want something else.
The store, which begins accepting consignment items June 29, is in the one-time GM Clotheshorse space in the same center where the Shadow is.
Pankratz likes the building for its high level of traffic and what she calls the uniqueness of the 2,200-square-foot space.
“It’s just got a lot of character to it,” she says.
“This business truly is going to be fun,” Pankratz says. “It’s about the hunt. It’s about the game.”