Some businesses are built on spreadsheets and projections. Fianna Hills Consignment Boutique was built on a mother-daughter dream. When the owner, Sheryl Carter, and her mother decided to take the leap in 2003, they didn't have a playbook, just a shared love of consignment and a genuine knack for connecting with people. They started small. A little hole-in-the-wall space, a lot of patience, and two people who believed that great customer service could build something special. It did.
Over the next two decades, the store outgrew one location, then another. Eventually tripling their square footage in the process. Today, Fianna Hills puts over 500 items on the floor every single day, has served thousands of consigners (they're now in the 5,000s in consigner numbering), and has a growing Shopify presence to match.
"Your customers become family," the owner says. "It's a challenge of all challenges — but it's just been fun."
In the early days, everything was done by hand. As the business grew, they moved to a legacy desktop-based consignment software — and it worked, for a while. But as Fianna Hills scaled, the limitations became harder to ignore.
Every computer needed its own license. Remote access wasn't an option. And when their old software provider's future became uncertain, it was time to make a move. The biggest fear? Moving thousands upon thousands of inventory items from one system to another without losing a thing.
"That was my scariest thing," the owner recalls. "How is all of this going to come from an old system to a new one?"
When Fianna Hills made the move to SimpleConsign, the onboarding process made all the difference. Working closely with the SimpleConsign team, every piece of data was carefully migrated, and when questions came up (and they did), help was right there.
"The support team is unmatched. Trevor was unbelievably phenomenal in making it happen. He calmed me down when I thought my head was going to explode. He was able to fix everything."
— Sheryl Carter, Owner of Fianna Hills Consignment Boutique
Once the dust settled, the team quickly discovered how much more they had on the other side of that transition.
Cloud-Based Access
This was the game-changer. No more being tethered to a single machine. The owner can check in on her store from anywhere, even on vacation.
“I can get on it when I'm sitting on the beach on vacation. It changed our whole game — things we weren't able to do with the old software.”
Her cousin, who handles a significant portion of the pricing, can now take work home and enter inventory remotely, something that simply wasn't possible before.
Shopify Integration
Fianna Hills launched their Shopify store in October 2024, and the SimpleConsign integration has been central to making it manageable. Items entered into SimpleConsign flow directly to the online store. No double entry, no duplicate effort. "It blows my mind that you can enter it in one place and it's done for the website." Sheryl shares.
The team uses the SimpleConsign Photo App to control exactly what goes online. Snap a photo, add a few extra condition details, and it's live. No extra steps, no separate workflow.
Price Compare Tool
With 500+ items hitting the floor daily, speed matters. The Price Compare feature has become a daily staple, helping the team price confidently by benchmarking against real market data in seconds.
And recently, they discovered something that had been there all along: by typing in the top search bar during inventory entry, SimpleConsign surfaces how similar items have historically sold in their own store, giving them an average selling price based on their actual data. "It's been doing it all this time! I just kept closing it. I had no clue." Sheryl shares that this is such a time-saver for her team while pricing items.
Custom Reports
From a top-10 customers report to employee entry tracking, the custom reporting tools give the team visibility they didn't have before. They're still exploring everything the reports can do, and finding new value each time.
The team is gearing up to launch SimpleConsign's Price Book — a tool that takes the guesswork out of pricing by letting stores set and manage pricing strategies by category, brand, and item condition. For a store moving 500+ items a day, having a smarter, more consistent pricing system is a must.
After a fresh website redesign (shoutout to Monkey in Hats), they're also doubling down on their online presence, with live selling on the horizon. And with AI-Automated Item Entry on their radar, which lets staff snap a photo and instantly push a fully populated listing to both the floor and Shopify simultaneously, the next chapter for Fianna Hills looks a lot faster than the last one.
For any consignment store owner on the fence — whether they're just getting started or thinking about switching from older software — the owner of Fianna Hills has a clear message:
"If you plan on your business going anywhere, just get started with the better program. Trying to do it by hand first and then making the switch is going to be more of a headache than just diving in and simplifying the process right up front."
And for those worried about the transition itself?
"If you're scared, don't be. The support is there. They will make it happen. I would never go back to the dinosaur age."