New women’s clothing consignment shop opens in Bangor

A new consignment shop that helps women resell their gently worn clothing, shoes and accessories has opened in downtown Bangor.

Jess Stuart and Josey Bornstein launched the Cool Girl Collective last month. The shop is located in Stuart’s other business, Glowgetters, a spray tan salon on the second floor of 4 Union St. beneath the Union Street bridge.

At the Cool Girl Collective, people can rent space in Stuart’s shop by the week to sell the items in their closet that they don’t wear. These could include clothes and accessories ordered online and never returned, or ones that have only been worn once or twice.

“Everybody has stuff in their closet that they think ‘Maybe one day I’ll wear that,’ but a year later, it’s still sitting there,” Stuart said. “Here, you can sell it to someone else who can get a little use out of it.”

The store is the latest secondhand clothing store to open in downtown Bangor with the mission of pushing back against wasteful fast fashion — poor quality clothing sold cheap to keep up with the latest trends. In March, Red Rabbit Bazaar opened in a new location on Columbia Street after launching in 2022 alongside other new vintage stores that settled downtown, such as White Lobster Vintage .

The Cool Girl Collective is designed as an alternative to other resale platforms, like Facebook Marketplace or Poshmark, that can be confusing, time consuming and require meeting with strangers to complete transactions.

Stuart said she feels her business stands out from nearby vintage stores because she accepts current, fast fashion brands from “the everyday girl who wants to sell her things.”

Stuart developed the idea when she found herself “swimming in jeans” and was looking to sell some, but struggled to find a platform that was simple to use and returned some of the money she spent.

“Other consignment stores have a lot of rules about what you can bring and when you can bring it,” Stuart said. “Some only take in-season things, so you have to store out-of-season things to sell at another time.”

The Cool Girl Collective allows vendors to set the price of each item and retains 30 percent of the net sales. Most other consignment stores pick the price of items and keep 60 percent of the profit, Stuart said.

“We’ve consistently had people take home a few hundred dollars,” Stuart said. “One girl last week took home $500, which was our most.”

The store has about 22 vendors, a few of which are permanent. Renting a booth in the store for a week costs $30.

Vendors come to the store on Sunday morning and fill their booth with their items. The store provides supplies, such as clothing hangers and price tags.

Sellers can reduce the price of their items on Thursday or Friday to encourage sales, then return on Friday evening to pick up whatever items didn’t sell. They collect their profits on the following Tuesday.

If vendors are renting booth space for more than one week, Stuart asks them to bring in new merchandise to keep the store fresh. Vendors can give whatever they don’t sell to the store’s “rebellion rack,” which features items for $5.