Richard Moot: Hello and welcome to the Square Developer Podcast. I'm your host, Richard Moot, and today I'm joined by Rhea Lana. I want to thank you all for being here today. I really, really appreciate you taking the time. If you wouldn't mind going ahead and giving quick little intros to tell us who you all are.Rhea Lana: Hi, Richard. I'm Rhea Lana and I'm the founder and also the current CEO.Erin Franklin: I am Erin Franklin. I am the CFO for Rhea Lana's, and I am also a franchise owner.Dave: And I'm Dave. I help Rhea Lana with technology.Richard Moot: Well, thank you so much. Rhea Lana, would you be so kind, tell us the story about what is Rhea Lana, give us the story of how this all started and bring us if possible to where we are today.Rhea Lana: Sure. Well, we host children's consignment events, and so families bring their gently used children's things and we sell them for them. And so it started when I was a stay-at-home mom actually in the early nineties. We had made a move from the corporate world and Dave was doing nonprofit work. And so I was a stay-at-home mom on a really tight budget. I loved cute kid’s clothes, but it was just hard to find good deals in a really high quality atmosphere. So the goal then, Richard, was not to build a business. I really was just doing this little thing for my friends. And so I invited moms to, and we did our first sale in my little living room. We moved the furniture out of the living room into our bedroom, and we had three racks of clothes and 11 consignors. A consignor is a mom who's selling her kids things. And so that was our very first sale in 1997. So that's how it started.Richard Moot: After the starting of that, what made you want to turn this into a full blown business?Rhea Lana: Well, after that very first sale, Dave actually is the one that said, Rhea Lana, we should computerize this. Well, back in the early nineties, stay-at-home moms didn't have computers in there. I didn't even know a mom who had a computer in their house, but we did. We computerized it and we said we had barcodes. And the interesting thing is that families just kept asking me to do it again and again and again. And so the model is just two times a year. And so for those first several years, we would have these little sales in my house and they would take over another room of the house and my daughter's room and the kitchen and the garage. And then finally we moved out of our house and we began to hold these events in locations around our little town in central Arkansas. And then we had families that were driving in from Little Rock, Arkansas, which is about an hour away. And I began to realize families love this, they appreciate it. It's helping them not only be able to buy high quality clothes, but sell things their families didn't need anymore. And it gradually was making a profit more and more. And so we began to realize, oh, this is something that could be a business.Richard Moot: That's awesome. And so where are we today with the size of Rhea Lana?Rhea Lana: Well, in, let's see, it was about 2008, I think. That's right. We decided we would franchise and we still were on a very limited budget. And so we knew that if we tried, it didn't have much to lose. We couldn't risk a lot is what I was going to say. We didn't have the money to hire some big fancy firm to help us, some consulting agency. We just thought, well, we'll just franchise it. I actually read the book Franchising for Dummies. That's not a joke. I did. And while my kids were swimming at the pool, I would check the things off and do the things. And thankfully I had a friend who was a really smart tax attorney, and so he helped me put our contracts together and then we just decided to see if anybody would buy a franchise. And so that's how we started our franchising company. And so today we have about 120 locations in about 26 states across the country, and we've served, now millions of families. And our heart is we love serving families and we love just adding value to lives to families across the country.Richard Moot: Wow, that's awesome. And so to hopefully give also how this all works, so you have 120 franchisees or franchises all throughout the United States, and this is an event based thing, right? There's two annual events. Tell me a little bit about how these events get set up and how big are they?Rhea Lana: Well, I'll start and then I'll let Erin share because she owns one of our early franchises, and I still own and operate our franchise in central Arkansas. But you're right, the model is that we hold semi-annual events. So we just do 'em twice a year. And when the franchisees start, they're like a baby, but they grow into these huge sales. And so we will fill up large like a Walmart or larger, and we will have several thousand families bring their things, but we just set it up, we take items in for about a week, and then we sell items for about a week. And so it's kind of a pop-up event, but it is ...
