Well if you’re reading this then you probably have seen my post about the shoplifting in Cool Girl. After noticing a few items, and then finding a huge amount of hidden tags in our dressing room, i made a story on instagram announcing id be posting videos of the shoplifters. I began to get messages from high school girls in the area, all different highschools telling me how they knew people at their school were stealing at cool girl by that time we had uncovered about $1500 in newly purchased merchandise was missing. Instead of continuing to look into what was missing. I decided that it’s time to look at the future and how to make sure this never happened again. and that is when I realize that retail security products are extremely expensive.
A lot of people have asked how the recent theft at Cool Girl was able to happen, and the honest answer is that we didn’t yet have the level of security most retail stores are set up with. Systems like security gates, tagging, video monitoring. These security measures have a high price tag, and I naively thought that us being a small business would shield us from some of other large retailers shoplifting issues. I focuses more on building our inventory, getting all of the things in to the store that I know that cool girls would like to see and figured that we would work out the security thing as we got more established. I was definitely naive.
After experiencing real loss from shoplifting, it’s clear these upgrades are no longer optional — they’re necessary to protect the store and keep Cool Girl strong moving forward.
The last year I’ve been so interested and enamored by crowd funding that I’ve seen on the Internet, where someone is in need or holding a burden and a lot of people come together and they give just a couple bucks and all of those people together, they're able to take the stress off of that person and in some cases I’ve seen to be absolutely life-changing. Cool girl was created as a collective of sellers. We our permanent vendors who sell in our store along with local women who consign their clothes they no longer the wear or that they had purchased on the Internet that didn’t fit and never returned. And over the last year, we’ve had over 7000 individual customers shopping in our stores. As i ran the numbers on security gates and surveillances instressed about how I would purchase all of this new security equipment and replenish the inventory that was stolen while keeping everything afloat. I started to think what if a small percentage of our customers gave a couple bucks because they wanted to see Cool Girl succeed. you can’t get a cup of coffee for less than five dollars these days but if even 10% of our customers threw in five dollars, we would so quickly be able to get all the security that we need at the store without feeling the financial stress of it.
if youre able to throw a couple dollars towards our cause, it would help so much and i believe this could be a lesson to the young girls who were shoplifting. We can show them how we lift other women up instead of stealing from them.
**Anyone who donates $10 or more will receive a coupon code in their email that can be used for 10% off their entire purchase at Cool Girl.
Anyone who donates more than $20 will get a coupon code emailed for 20% off their entire purchase at Cool Girl. You can double your money just by contributing to our cause. ***
thank you in advance for supporting Cool Girl and all of our vendors and consigners and helping us keep our store secure and profitable.
