Rada Boutique and Upscale Consignment #2

It isn’t every day that a small business owner tells a customer not to buy something.  But for Rada Frohlichstein, owner of Rada Boutique and Upscale Consignment located at 394 Main St. in downtown Wakefield, sometimes doing just that makes good business sense.

Take the customer who came in one day looking for a new top.  The customer had a date that night, and she said she “needed” a white lacey top to wear.  What she’d forgotten, but Frohlicstein remembered, was that she already had such a top.  She’d bought it at Rada a year earlier.

“Oh my God,” the customer said.  “I forgot all about it.”

Frohlichstein may have lost a sale that day, but the customer would be back.  She bought some jewelry on her return trip, Frohlichstein recalled at the shop last Friday.

So why didn’t Frohlicstein just let the customer buy the top?

Because if she did, then the customer would be wasting her money, she said, and that’s no way to keep people coming back.

“You lose it [the sale] for one day,” Frohlicstein added, “but you gain so much more by being honest with your customer.”

Of course Frohlicstein doesn’t just talk customers out of buying things; she makes actual sales as well.  Rada averages about $500 a day in sales, Frohlicstein said.

Prices at Rada vary, with boutique items priced as low as $8 and as high as $228.  The range for consignment, or used, items is even greater, with merchandise going for as little as $5, and as much as $1,500.  Chanel bags and Christian Dior fur coats are the items found at the high end of the consignment price range, Frohlicstein said.

The folks at Rada pride themselves on making sure customers know how to work their new purchases into their many different looks.  It’s not just about selling their customers clothes, Frohlicstein said; it’s about “dressing” them.

“That’s what’s cool here,” Debbie Luisi, Frohlicstein’s longtime friend who helps at the shop on an as needed basis, said at the shop a few weeks ago.  “You know everyone that comes in.  We know their sizes.  You know what they like.”  When a new piece of clothing comes in that matches a particular customer’s style, Luisi noted, they’ll hold it for that customer.  It’s all part of knowing their customers and understanding these customers’ individual styles.

Given this commitment to “dressing” her customers, does Frohlicstein ever talk customers out of buying clothes she doesn’t think look good them?

“God yes,” she said, and gave an example of a woman who wanted to buy a jumpsuit that was about three sizes too small.

Frohlicstein worked harder that day to not make a sale than she’s ever worked to make a sale, she said.  She assured the customer that she could order a better size, and in the end, she succeeded in talking the customer out of the purchase.  But only temporarily.

“Three days later she came back when I wasn’t here and bought the suit,” Frohlicstein laughed.

Well, she tried.