About The Closet Trading Company
The Closet Trading Co. began in 2003 as a college side hustle and grew into one of Southern California's most beloved women's resale boutiques. In 2003, founder Johanna Zlenko took over a small Santa Barbara boutique, planting the seeds for what would become The Closet Trading Co. When the 2008 recession hit, Johanna leaned in rather than pulling back, opening a second location and turning what had begun as a college side hustle into a full-time career. Today, The Closet Trading Co. operates nine locations across California and Florida, employs a team of 40, and serves more than 12,000 active consigners.
The brand is built around a simple but powerful idea: make sellers feel valued, and make buyers feel like the store already knows their taste. Every boutique maintains a tightly curated selection of women's contemporary and higher-end clothing and accessories, making the resale experience feel as welcoming and elevated as any traditional boutique.
The Challenge
Before adopting AI-Automated Item Entry, The Closet Trading Co. was operating at nearly 99% drop-ship on Shopify — meaning virtually none of their in-store inventory was visible to online shoppers. Manual desktop entry into SimpleConsign was relatively quick, but it produced no product image, making Shopify listings a separate, time-consuming effort. Photography for social media happened as a disconnected step after intake was already complete. The result: most items never made it online at all.
The Approach
Johanna took a deliberate, phased approach. Rather than rolling out AI Item Entry across all locations at once, she started with experienced buyers at lower-volume stores, giving them room to work out the kinks before expanding to the wider team. SimpleConsign resources anchored the initial training, and early adopters became internal coaches for their colleagues.
Rethinking the Workflow
Johanna shares that at a high level, AI Item Entry may take new team members slightly longer per item than traditional desktop entry — but Johanna quickly rejects that as the relevant comparison. The real question, she says, isn't how long it takes to enter an item. It's how long it takes to sell one. "It's really like, how long does it take to sell the item? If I can sell it fast by cross-listing it on Shopify and in-store, then overall it's a timesaver."
By capturing a photo at intake, the image goes straight to SimpleConsign, Shopify, and social — collapsing what used to be five to eight separate touch points into a single step at the buy desk.
"It collapses like five to eight previous steps or touch points into two. So it's incredibly, massively efficient if you are interested in selling both online and in-store.
The Results
The Closet Trading Co. is currently at approximately 20% AI Item Entry across all stores. Even so, the results are already significant.
"We were at 99% drop-ship. We weren't even including any store inventory because it was so time-consuming. And now we're at 20% on Shopify, which is like night and day from where we were a few months ago."
Shopify inventory went from essentially zero to 20% of in-store items cross-listed online. Stores that adopted first are seeing Shopify contribute meaningfully to topline revenue and customer reach. Product photography, once a separate workflow, is now captured once at intake and used everywhere. And staff who were initially resistant have come around as the Shopify sales started rolling in. Johanna shares, "Once you start to see the results you feel more vested in the product and the process. They totally understand how this makes more sense. It's actually not harder — just different."
Looking ahead
Johanna's goal is 100% AI Item Entry across all owned locations by end of year, and she's already building for it, with new store buildouts designed around photography stations from day one. For her, AI Item Entry is just one piece of a much larger technology transformation underway at The Closet Trading Co., spanning everything from consigner outreach and wishlists to employee performance tracking and customer chat. The throughline is the same in every case: access to tools that would have been out of reach just a few years ago.
"AI opens up a whole new world that was completely out of reach without hundreds of thousands of dollars in capital a couple of years ago. I have no doubt that it's going to evolve. The more learnings it has, the more powerful it will become. You may as well learn how to do it now."
— Johanna Zlenko, Founder & Owner of TCTC
