Emile Gibson runs a used uniform sale at her K-8 charter school that raises about $1,000 every summer in a two-hour window. The surprise: adding a free piece-for-piece exchange, which looked like giving money away, pulled in more families and kept revenue strong. Here's how the inventory, the exchange, the three-station floor, and the timing all fit together.
Emile Gibson runs the quietest, most efficient fundraiser I've come across, and I'd never even heard of it before I called her. She's the business administrator at Monticello Academy, a K-8 charter school of about 700 students where uniforms are required, and every summer she and a handful of parent volunteers run a used uniform sale fundraiser out of the school gym. Families donate the uniforms their kids have outgrown, the school builds an inventory over the year, and then before the school year starts they sell it all back at a few dollars a piece. Two-hour sale. About an hour of setup. Roughly a thousand dollars, year after year. And here's the part that made me want to write this down: the biggest thing she changed didn't cost her a cent and looked, on paper, like it should have wiped out the profit entirely. It did the opposite.
I wasn't sure how a school turns a pile of donated hand-me-downs into a fundraiser that families actually plan their summer around, so I asked Emile to walk me through it. What she described isn't really about uniforms. It's a model that works for any school with a required dress code and a community of families cycling in and out.
Start with the plain version, because it's simpler than it sounds. A used uniform sale is a fundraiser where a school collects gently used uniforms that families have outgrown, stores them by size through the year, and then sells them secondhand at a steep discount, usually right before the new school year. It raises money, but its real engine is that it solves a genuine problem for the families it serves, which is why they keep coming back. At Monticello that discount is dramatic. A girl's plaid jumper that retails around $40 goes for $10. Shirts are $3. Pants are $5. Burgundy cardigans are $8. For a Title I school where a lot of families are stretching every dollar, an entire uniform wardrobe for under a hundred bucks isn't a nice-to-have, it's the reason the doors get a line out front.
Emile said it better than I could. "I think that's probably why it's so successful every year, because it is meeting a need that our community has. The ability to make a little bit of revenue off of that is a byproduct. The focus is serving our families." Hold onto that order of priorities, service first and money second, because it turns out to be the practical secret, not just a nice sentiment.
When I asked Emile what advice she'd give a school that wanted to copy this, she didn't talk about the sale at all. She talked about the year before it. Emile says the first step is building an inventory of donations, because you cannot run a sale, and you definitely cannot run an exchange, with nothing on the tables. Monticello set up a simple donation bin in the school where families drop off uniforms their kids have outgrown or don't need after graduating or moving. Those donations pile up quietly all year. Volunteers sort and store them by size and gender, then pull everything out for the summer sale.
The reassuring part is how small you're allowed to start. Emile was clear that you do not need a warehouse. The first time Monticello did it on donations, they had maybe five or six items in each size. That was enough to get going. Today they store it all in about six of those big black Costco bins, organized by size and cut, but that inventory was built one donation bin at a time over several years. If you're standing at zero, the move is not to plan the sale. The move is to put out a bin and tell your families why.
If it were me, this is where I'd start, and it's the part that scares people. A couple of years in, Monticello added an exchange to the sale. If a family still needs uniforms but has outgrown ones to hand back, they bring their old items and swap them, piece for piece, at no cost. Kid finished kindergarten in a size five and shot up to a seven over the summer? Bring the fives, walk out with sevens, pay nothing.
When they proposed it, the fear was exactly what you'd guess. Emile told me the board worried "if we do the exchanges, maybe we'll only make half of what we normally would." It's the logical worry. You're handing away for free the very thing you used to charge for. At Monticello, adding a free exchange grew the sale instead of shrinking it, because it pulled in more families overall and every exchange refilled the tables with fresh inventory for the next shopper. Revenue held steady, and if anything it improved. More families came because they knew they'd get credit for what they already had. And each armful of swapped-in clothes became new stock other families then bought. One mom with five kids in the school walked in, did straight exchanges, and left with over 50 items she paid nothing for. That same day, other families found sizes on the tables that only existed because she'd brought them in. The exchange isn't a leak in the bucket. It's the thing that keeps the bucket full.
The exchange only works if the logistics are clean, and Emile was refreshingly honest that they weren't at first. Early on, exchanges happened at the register, which got messy fast. Whose pile is this, which of these are you buying, which are you swapping. So they redesigned the floor into three stations, and this is the operational heart of the whole thing.
Monticello split the sale into three separate jobs: an intake table where a volunteer counts a family's exchange items and hands them a ticket, a sorter who immediately folds those items back into the inventory by size, and a completely separate checkout where the ticket gets redeemed. The ticket works like a gift card. A parent hands over ten shirts and three pairs of pants, gets a ticket that says so, and at checkout the cashier pulls those items off the total and only rings up whatever's left. Meanwhile the sorter has already laid the swapped-in clothes out on the tables, which is why savvy parents shop once when they arrive and circle back at the end to see what's new. The intake person also does a quiet quality check on each item, no stains, no holes, no missing buttons, and confirms it meets the school's uniform rules, before it ever earns a ticket. Eight volunteers ran the whole thing the year Emile described, with a couple of them working intake and sorting while others handled the register.
One small grace note: if a family has ticket credit left over and can't find what they need, they can donate the leftover freebie forward to the next person in line. Some do, some wave it off as a donation. Either way the good will stays in the room.
The last piece is timing, and Emile's is deliberate. Monticello runs the sale in early to mid July, on purpose, ahead of when Target, Walmart, and Old Navy roll out their back-to-school uniform sales. That way families can get what they can from the school first, then fill any gaps at the big stores before school starts in mid August. Monticello schedules the sale before the national retailers start their back-to-school promotions, so its families shop the school's discounted inventory first instead of last. The school also advertises to every new family at registration with a simple flyer, so parents know about the sale before their kid has even started.
The event itself is almost aggressively modest, and that's the point. A two-hour window, 10 to noon, in the gym on folding tables with printed signs marking each size and cut. About an hour to set up. A nice touch that costs nothing: volunteers who help set up get to shop early, before the doors open, which is enough of a perk that Emile picked up three extra hands that way. Reasonable hours, a small crew, a couple of hours of actual selling, and a steady thousand dollars that shows up every single year.
Monticello Academy used uniform sale, at a glance: a K-8 charter school of about 700 students with required uniforms and a large share of Title I families. Donated uniforms collected in a school bin all year, stored by size in roughly six large bins. A two-hour summer sale (10 to noon) in the gym, about an hour of setup, run by around 8 volunteers from the parent council. Shirts $3, pants $5, cardigans $8, a $40-retail jumper for $10. A free piece-for-piece exchange runs alongside the sale. Timed for early-to-mid July, ahead of the big-box back-to-school sales. Result: about $1,000 raised most years, and a genuine service the whole school community relies on.
This was Monticello's first campaign on SuccessFund, and since Emile ran the sale on it, I'll say my piece, and yes, I'm the founder, so take this with the necessary grain of salt. A used uniform sale is really a little pop-up store, and that's exactly what the platform is good at here. You build each item as a product with its price set once, so at checkout nobody is doing mental math over a folding table. Emile's words: "We weren't trying to do this mental math of adding things up. You've got three shirts, two pants, one sweater, it gives you the total." A volunteer with a card reader can take a tap or a card, and cash gets logged right in the app, which makes change for you and tracks who took it. Families can also pay by Venmo at online checkout, which matters the moment you take this beyond the gym.
The part that clearly mattered most to Emile, as the person responsible for the money, was reconciliation. Every cash and card payment lands in one real-time results view, so at the end of the day the cash box matches the log exactly. "When we count our cash box and it matches exactly what we've logged, that was wonderful. That's something that in our previous system we didn't have." She also had every volunteer sign in with a volunteer code, so mobile helpers could run the register without needing full accounts, and she could see who did what. And the idea she's most excited about for next year is the one this unlocks: instead of only selling in a two-hour window, set the leftover inventory up as a year-round online store so a family who moves in mid-year can order sizes online and have a volunteer pull and prep them. A required-uniform school always has families arriving off-cycle. Now the sale doesn't have to be a single Saturday.
Emile has worn just about every hat at that school, parent volunteer, board member, and now business administrator, and she's run this sale from most of those angles, so I can only imagine how many versions of it she's watched evolve. The thing she kept coming back to is the same thing that surprised her most: they braced for the exchange to cut their revenue in half, and instead the fundraiser stayed strong and served far more families. That's the lesson. What keeps Monticello's sale going is that it solves a real problem for their families first, and that's what makes people show up year after year without being asked. Build the inventory before you build the event. Add the exchange even though it feels backwards. Keep the intake, the sorting, and the checkout on separate tables. And time it before the stores beat you to it.
If your school requires uniforms, or knows one that does, forward this to whoever runs your parent council or PTA. The whole model rests on a pile of clothes families were going to give away anyway, and the only thing standing between your school and a thousand quiet dollars every summer is a donation bin and a plan for the day. Go to SuccessFund, set up a simple store with your items and prices, and click around to see how the checkout and cash logging feel. It's free, there's nothing to commit to, and you'll understand it faster than you would reading another word from me.
And when you hit the real questions, how to price a secondhand jumper, how many volunteers you need, how to keep an exchange line from turning to chaos, ask in the SuccessFund community forum. Odds are another school has already run the exact sale you're planning, ticket system and all, and they'll tell you what actually happened.
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