Caitlin Shannon didn't come from retail. She spent her career as a pediatric and labor and delivery nurse before a chance conversation at a kids' consignment shop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire changed everything. The owners offered to franchise their store, and while Caitlin ultimately decided to go independent, that conversation planted a seed — and less than two years later, Fiddle & Find was open.
The shop carries children's clothing, toys, books, maternity and nursing wear, and recently expanded into women's clothing. Caitlin's guiding vision has always been curation and consistency. She wants customers to feel like they're walking into a boutique and prides the business on being women-owned and environmentally friendly.
With 432 active consignors and a small team, keeping up with inventory intake was one of the store's biggest operational challenges, and the spark for adopting SimpleConsign's AI-Automated Item Entry feature.
Caitlin used SimpleConsign from opening day, a recommendation that came from the very shop owners who had inspired her to open. The system gave Fiddle & Find a strong foundation from the start, but as the store's reputation grew, so did the volume of consignment items coming through the door. With more inventory arriving than the team could comfortably keep up with, the manual entry process became the bottleneck.
Each item still needed to be entered individually — brand, category, condition, description, price — and with a small team of varying experience levels, that added up fast. Newer staff members brought different levels of confidence to the process, which meant Caitlin found herself spending more time reviewing entries and handling pricing sign-off than she wanted. It wasn't a systems problem; it was a capacity one. The store had simply grown to a point where it needed a faster way in.
Caitlin first heard about AI-Automated Item Entry through a SimpleConsign email newsletter and upgraded her plan in the fall to include it. The team built a workflow around it quickly. Staff photograph items on their phones, no app required, no need for polished images, and AI auto-populates the description, category, brand, and suggested price. Staff then do a batch review on the desktop, making quick edits, before Caitlin does a final pricing pass and items are printed and tagged.
Onboarding was smooth. The team picked it up fast, and the low barrier to entry meant even less experienced staff members could participate in inventory processing almost immediatel. If you have a phone, you can enter inventory. "You don't have to download an app or anything. Everybody's got a phone, so it's easy peasy," Caitlin said.
One practical bonus: the photo stays attached to the item record, giving Caitlin a visual reference when she reviews pricing rather than relying solely on text descriptions.
Volume: In April alone, Fiddle & Find entered 1,385 items — a figure Caitlin describes as a fairly typical month.
Time savings: AI Item Entry has cut entry time by an estimated 25–50% compared to fully manual entry. Rather than building every record from scratch, staff make quick edits to an AI-generated baseline.
Per-shift productivity: Where a staff member might have processed three bags of inventory in a shift before, they're now getting through closer to five — a roughly 65% increase in per-shift output without adding headcount.
Delegation: The ability to hand off photography and initial entry to part-time employees has meaningfully shifted how Caitlin spends her time. Staff who would previously have been limited to register work can now independently move inventory through the system.
Consistency: Item records are more uniform across the board. Brand names, categories, and descriptions are more standardized than when each team member was building entries from scratch.
Flexibility: Caitlin has found she can photograph items at the store and complete the editing review from home when needed, a small but meaningful flexibility for a hands-on owner.
AI Item Entry is one piece of a broader system that has become the operational backbone of Fiddle & Find. The store also uses SimpleConsign's scheduling calendar (calendly.com integration) for consignment appointments, QuickBooks integration, and a growing library of custom reports — including reports for consignor balances, grace period items, inactive accounts, and donated inventory for tax purposes.
"I think it's like a one-stop shop — there's your baseline register and purchase flow, then you have the reports, the calendar, the price book. It makes everything cohesive,"
Looking further ahead, Caitlin sees Shopify integration as a natural next step once the store is ready to sell online. She was interested to learn that AI-Automated Item Entry makes that transition significantly easier, photos and descriptions flow directly to the online storefront without any duplicate entry work.
For owners just getting started, Caitlin's advice comes back to getting the right infrastructure in place early. Find a space, handle the legal setup, and immediately invest in a POS system that will scale with you. Simple Consign gave Fiddle & Find a foundation to build on from day one — and has continued to grow alongside the business as its needs have evolved.
"I told myself I needed a good system to make this really happen. Find a space, do the legal thing — but then get a POS system that's going to really do it for you. SimpleConsign taught me how to run my store."
On AI specifically: "I think AI in general is a lot of our future whether we like it or not. And in this instance — if you're growing — it just helps with time and consistency."