FRIENDLY FASHION EXCHANGE
Shwap Club’s couture & community
Shopping meets swapping in a new St-Henri clothing exchange its creator envisages as much as a community as a place to find cool women’s fashion.
On one level, the Shwap Club is a women’s fashion boutique. But the currency used by shoppers is not cash or credit: It’s clothing.
It works like this: You bring in clothing you don’t wear anymore, for whatever reason — up to 20 items. They’re clean, in season, current — purchased within the past three years — and in excellent condition. You drop them off at a counter at the entrance, where you pay a $12 entrance fee (or an annual fee of $85).
“And while we sort, you shop,” Shwap Club creator Annette Nguyen says of herself and her team of three or four.
Shoppers can take with them as many items as the team accepts. People can keep items that are not accepted or leave them for the Shwap Club to donate to organizations such as Le Chaînon, which helps women in difficulty.
Nguyen, 30, and retail have long been a good fit. She’s had part-time retail jobs since she was a teenager and worked at such high-end stores as Holt Renfrew and Billie Boutique. “I enjoyed myself.”
She earned a law degree at the Université de Montréal. After law school, she worked at the outerwear company Mackage until leaving for media agency Newad, where she has been manager of corporate partnership development since 2012.
About a decade ago, Nguyen started to sell her own clothing through blog posts. People would come to her apartment, try on clothes and buy them.
“I was meeting people, creating relationships,” she said.
She liked it, although there was a downside: the people who didn’t honour appointments and the fact that the experience wasn’t exactly a money-making proposition, but “more like a yard sale.”
Still, the experience stayed with her — and got her thinking. What could she do, she asked herself, to be part of a community that promotes a shared economy and addresses environmental challenges facing us today.
“It’s a good moment to question our relationship with things: your car, your home, how you buy things and the way you dispose of things, which is often very wasteful,” she said.
Like her, many millennials “go to an event, wear a dress once — and it is over. They’re not going to be caught wearing the same dress twice.
“So what are you going to do with it?” You can try to sell it. Or give it away. But what if you could exchange it for another dress you could wear once?
Nguyen researched the market and, except for one place in Madison, Wis., found no one operating the kind of place she envisioned.
She started out in a 300-squarefoot space. “My main concern was whether I would have enough inventory,” she said.
“Next thing you know, I had a room full of clothes.”
She had to move to a larger space. At a recent Shwap Club session, 560 items of clothing changed hands in two hours — 300 came in and 260 went out.
The Shwap Club is open four hours a week: two on Wednesday evening and two on Sunday afternoon. When she isn’t travelling for work or pleasure, Nguyen is usually on hand. “I find it is very important to meet and greet, and talk about the project,” she said. “And it’s so much fun.”
To her, the club is also an opportunity for women, many of whom are in their 30s and have settled into careers, some into relationships, to meet and mingle and even become friends.
Brands include Zara, BCBG, Aritzia brand Wilfred and local designers like Eve Gravel and Mélissa Nepton. But “we focus more on how trendy an item is than on the brands.”
Most of the items brought in are dresses, jeans and blazers. Nguyen said she would like more T-shirts and activewear.
Right now, the Shwap Club breaks even. To make money, she said she needs more stores. Nguyen said she hopes to open a Shwap Club for children in 2019 and, after that, a third. She hopes also to expand to Quebec City or to Ottawa.
She is focused on building her brand and making sure that the experience people have while at the Shwap Club continues to be a good one.
They’re not going to be caught wearing the same dress twice. So what are you going to do with it?