Not your average garage sale…!
Just before graduating from a college marketing program, I helped stage a weekend-long “Attic Sale” with my girlfriend’s family.
And that’s exactly what it was. A chance to clear the attic… and the garage, and the basement, and… you get the idea.
She lived in a pretty well-to-do area, with multi-million-dollar homes even in the late 80’s. So the collection of clothes, home electronics, antique furniture, paintings, even an antique car was…
Definitely out of the ordinary!
We had just bought a computer that came with a fancy ‘dot-matrix’ computer (yeah, it was THAT long ago). So with some sketchy clipart and a little creativity, we bought reams of pastel-coloured paper and photocopied hundreds of letter-sized posters announcing the event.
It was like a top-secret undercover assignment, putting them up on all of the telephone poles around the neighborhood during midnight runs a few weeks before the sale…
But not your average neighborhood sign-plastering…
Most of the posters went up OUTSIDE of the immediate neighborhood where the family lived. Because this exclusive area of Toronto was pretty well-known… so people were dying to see what kinds of things they’d find from the fancy neighborhood.
And then the unthinkable happened…
With just a week to go, all of our posters were cut from their poles in one night by the city’s cleanup crew!
(I don’t know if there were bylaws about ‘no posting’, but there were plenty of others on many of the poles before we got there. Your call…)
Now we knew the signs had already made an impression, since they were taped up at eye-level for both pedestrians and car passengers to read them. And we’d gotten some phone calls already, too… so the barrage of multi-coloured posters had done their job.
Still, with a week to go and just one other little $30 classified ad in the paper for exposure, we weren’t taking any chances. So, with our tape guns and spy gear in hand, we went out and plastered more posters in the surrounding neighborhoods, just to make sure nobody would miss them.
Did it work? Well, that’s an understatement!
I think the first knock on the door came at about 6am that Saturday, while we were still brewing the day’s first pot of coffee. Before we’d even started putting things out on the lawn surrounding the corner-lot house…
Fortunately, everyone in the family was ready with their assigned duties, and weeks of preparation meant almost every item was organized with a price sticker and a selling strategy.
So by the end of Sunday afternoon, almost everything was sold. Even the car — a 1960 Beardmore taxicab from Britain (a lot like the ones you’ve seen in the old Beatles movie ‘A Hard Day’s Night’). And a painting from a group of artists that had become a bit of a collector’s item in the years since the family had bought it.
A lot of buyers made some excellent deals on really unusual stuff… and we were SO glad we didn’t have to carry much of it back inside!
All counted, we made over $53,000 that weekend.
I think I slept like a stone for almost 2 days afterwards…
Tags: biz development, garage sale success, local business promotion
