The February 19, 2010 Business First Magazine featured this wonderful article about
Angela Merici 1962 Grad, Margaret Clark Browning. We would like to congratulate Margaret
on her success!!
CINDERELLA STORY
A childhood of deprivation led Margaret Browning to create Margaret's
Consignment and revolutionize Louisville's secondhand business
By: Terry Boyd
In her song “Second Hand Rose,” Barbra Streisand kvetched that “even things I’m wearing, someone wore before.”
In 1968, the secondhand shop Streisand made famous had, well, a serious schlock problem.
In 2010, that has changed in Louisville — largely because of one woman.
Margaret Browning has drawn on her own talent for seeing value where others don’t and revolutionized Louisville’s secondhand business. With Margaret’s Consignment and Collectibles Inc., she replaced the thrift-shop image with an upscale boutique featuring hot labels, expensive decor and more than a whiff of respectability not lost on imitators.
“Elegant!” is the way Browning puts it. “I do love elegant.”
Frankfort Avenue pioneer
Her 28-year-old Frankfort Avenue business — a complex of four cottages converted to storefronts at 2700 Frankfort Ave. — employs 11 people and has become a destination for bargain hunters from all tax brackets.
Browning likes to say that she sells to everyone from millionaires who can afford to shop anywhere to people with nothing who can’t afford to shop anywhere else.
She’s one of a group of perhaps a dozen entrepreneurs — including restaurateurs Tim Coury, Michael and Sioban Reidy and Bim Dietrich and Quest Outdoors owners Don and Barbara Burch — who turned the once dreary Frankfort Avenue business district into a vital retail corridor.
Joie de vivre
John Johnson, who owns The Wine Rack at 2632 Frankfort, calls Browning “a champion of the area … a tireless promoter” of the Frankfort Avenue Business Association and its component small businesses. Johnson, like many who know the petite Browning, has stories about her expansive personality.
“She really embraced me when I moved here” to open The Wine Rack in 2003. “She literally brought people into my store and insisted that they shop here,” Johnson said. “And who wants to argue with her?”
Those who know Browning say she has a desire to see others do as well as she has done well. She wants others to enjoy life as she enjoys a life she can’t quite believe she created.
Browning’s oft-repeated line about her success is, “Not bad for a Shively girl.” She moves easily in “society.” She rarely is seen in anything less than black Armani and heels. She has a vacation home in Florida.
What is not so well-known is that her life is not just “rags to riches,” it’s drawn on dark, almost Dickensian themes.
“People who know about the childhood abuse say, ‘Margaret, I don’t know how you ever survived it,’ ” Browning said.
Margaret Browning was born Margaret Clark and lived off Rockford Lane in Shively. “Not the good side, but the side that had the cinder road at the time.”
She was the third of 12 children, and she is blunt about the circumstances — too many children with too little parenting from an alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother.
“I have no memories of a normal father or mother,” Browning said,
The “normal” came from inside. Browning remembers being 5 years old, dusting a buffet table and arranging lamps in an attempt to give her house some style.
“We were so poor, everything we had was something someone else threw away,” she said. “I guess I was so embarrassed I wanted to make things look better, like my friends’ houses.
“I was always blessed with taking nothing and making it into something.”
It was a survival skill.
An adult at 15
When Margaret Clark was 15 years old, her father came home after a drinking binge and told her she wouldn’t be going back to school the following year. There was yet another baby on the way, and she’d have to stay home and take care of it.
“I said, ‘That’s illegal!’ But I had to quit and take care of the 10th baby. I slept at the (foot) of a twin bed, and I took care of my brother, Brad.” It cost her a year, and she graduated late from Angela Merici High School.
Not a night goes by, Browning said, that she doesn’t dream about cooking and taking care of babies. “There was too much put on me at a too young an age.”
By the early 1980s, her life hadn’t gotten dramatically better. She was in her 40s and had worked for 25 years as a beautician at Eli’s Barber Shop in the Bacons Center on
Dixie Highway. She was divorced and trying to support her teenage daughter. So she started thinking about capitalizing on her talent of making something from nothing — the copper pot or the silver-plated bowl she’d buy at yard sales for 50 cents, polish up, then resell for $5 at her own weekend sales.
“I did that for years and years,” Browning said.
In 1982, she decided to open her own consignment shop at Stilz and Frankfort avenues, paying $425 per month in rent for five rooms that had been an apartment.
Browning worked around the clock, cutting hair in the mornings and building her business at night. Because she didn’t yet have consignment accounts, she would hit yard sales, clean up her haul and turn it into the inventory for her new shop.
Not an overnight success
The early days of Margaret’s Consignment were far from auspicious.
After she left the barbershop to concentrate on her shop, she struggled to make ends meet, and she tells stories about making it through days with $1 in her purse. But by 1991, Margaret’s Consignment was making enough money that Browning was able to buy a bigger location with better visibility.
Even then, Browning wasn’t exactly rolling in dough.
The building she bought in 1991 became part of a 5,000-square-foot complex of selling space. She recalls that in the expansion process, she got down to 11 cents in her business account. Browning said she prayed that weekend and got a miracle: The shop took in $3,000 over a Friday and Saturday.
“Monday, I had to run to the bank and pay the (overdraft) fee. I said, ‘Thank you, Jesus!’
“I’ll tell you … we didn’t give up, but I was sweating a few times. I was divorced. I had to make money. I thought, ‘I have to do it.’ I was in a situation where I had to survive, and that’s all I focused on.
“I prayed and I hoped, and I never said, ‘What if I fail?’ ”
Driving business on Frankfort Avenue
Today, Margaret’s Consignments is booming, generating about $1.5 million in annual sales. And it’s an engine for driving surrounding businesses, with Browning as the spark plug.
“No question, Margaret has a big role” in the Frankfort Avenue Business Association, said Don Burch. Browning was among the first who Burch said invested in a Frankfort Avenue corridor that today is “dramatically different from when we arrived,” with more shops and double the number of restaurants.
“I give Margaret a lot of credit,” Burch said. “She’s an absolute doer. And as good as she is, you have to have something driving you inside. I think she’s trying to put as much distance between who she is today and an ugly start.”
Browning still works seven days a week, her employees say. And she never asks employees to do anything she wouldn’t do, said Pat Moore, Margaret’s Consignment store manager.
“Oh, yeah,” added Chris Garner, a saleswoman, “you look up and she’s climbing the ladder to change some display— in heels!”
Browning herself said she’ll never escape her past, and she doesn’t want to.
“My sister used to say, ‘Oh, don’t say 12 kids when you talk to people.’ I’m proud of it. If I hadn’t have gone through it all, I wouldn’t be who I am today.
“Nothing’s going to my head. If it did, God would take it all away.”
Green Acres? No, thanks
Margaret Browning has become woven into the fabric of the Crescent Hill neighborhood, though she did make an unsuccessful attempt to move to the country.
After she married John Browning in 2005, she sold a house on Kennedy Avenue, a few blocks from her Frankfort Avenue shop, and moved to Finchville, in Shelby County.
“One day I get a call,” said Don Burch, Quest Outdoors owner, “and it’s Margaret. She says, ‘I’m calling you from beautiful Finchville. It’s a beautiful day. The sun is shining. The breeze is blowing. I’m bored to death.’ ”
Browning sold the house and bought another house in Crescent Hill, which she completely redecorated, Burch said.
“I’ll never not have a house in Crescent Hill,” Browning said.