We're in Good Company: Second Time Around and Consign & Design

We’re in Good Company. Town and Country Bank and Peoples Prosperity Bank are honored to serve communities where small business owners and nonprofits are innovative and resilient.

Surviving an economic downturn or crisis is difficult enough when you own one business, but it’s doubly hard when you own two, like Elizabeth Fishburn in Springfield. She owns a local woman’s clothing consignment store called Second Time Around and a furniture and housewares consignment store next to it called Consign & Design.

Second Time Around, which Elizabeth has owned since 2008, carries upscale clothes for women aged from about thirty to sixty. “We have mall brands, but we mostly have boutique and designer clothes,” Elizabeth says. “Our customers aren’t just from Central Illinois. We have people from Texas, Florida, Missouri, and a nice audience from Chicago, including a lot of state senators. When the legislature is in session, they hit our store and then head back to Chicago.”

She acquired the store after her daughters worked there and the previous owner was ready to sell. In 2011, she opened Consign & Design next door.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been “terrible” for the businesses, she says. “Our sales dropped 90 percent.” When it began in mid-March, she had to lay off all employees. “Traffic to our store had stopped. Originally, we told employees just to go home. We thought we’d be open again on April 7th.” Of course, that didn’t happen.

“The first few days, you think, ‘It’s only going to last until April 7th. This is a nice vacation and there are some things at home I want to get done,’” Elizabeth says. “Then you learn it’s going to last 30 more days and you start to panic. You think, ‘Can I make it? What bills do I have coming up? FICA is due, sales tax is due, rent is going to be due, and you start to panic. And that’s rent for two stores.”

She was able to do some online sales for clothes and other items, but sales were limited for her furniture shop. “People aren’t going to buy a couch online. You can’t ship that,” Elizabeth says. “We were able to sell our pieces that are smaller and could be shipped, like some miniature antique sewing machines.”

On May 1st, her stores were able to open for curbside service, which helped. So did the Small Business Administration Paycheck Protection Program Loan she secured. “I want to give a shout-out to Town and Country for having our back,” says Elizabeth. “Once the PPP (offer) ran out of funds when it was first offered, we hadn’t heard if we got our application through or not. I was in despair. Then I got an email from the bank saying, ‘Sign your loan documents.’ It was a happy day!”

With that loan, she brought back four employees and paid two months rent for both stores. “It gave me peace of mind,” she adds. So did the support she got from customers who posted encouraging comments on the stores’ Facebook pages and then told them to her in person when they stopped by to pick up curbside orders.

The crisis taught her to continue promoting online sales and utilize Facebook advertising. Most importantly, she saw that, “You can never save enough money. What you think is enough, isn’t,” Elizabeth says. “I’m just grateful at this point. Without the PPP, we would have looked at closing both stores.”

Instead, Consign & Design as well as Second Time Around reopened on May 29th.

For more information or to apply for an SBA Paycheck Protection Program loan, please visit us here today!