New Nonprofit Art Thrift Store Opens; Downtown Boutique Model Faces 'Affordable' Competition

WAUKESHA — Scraps and Sparks, a nonprofit art supply thrift store, opened Tuesday in the former dry cleaner space at 213 E. Broadway, selling donated acrylic paint sets for $3.50, canvas boards for 75 cents, and loose ribbon by the pound out of a repurposed salad bar sneeze guard the founder describes as "structurally sound and also free." Within four days, the store had become the subject of at least two tense conversations among downtown boutique owners, none of whom would speak on the record.

Executive director Carol Anhalt, a retired Waukesha West art teacher who founded the nonprofit last spring after what she calls "eleven years of watching a closet fill up with other people's leftover glitter," said the store's mission is simple: keep usable art and craft materials out of the landfill and get them into the hands of people who can't otherwise afford them. Anhalt said the store priced everything using a formula she developed herself, which she summarized as "what would make somebody actually buy this instead of feeling guilty about it," and which has produced a pricing sheet featuring the phrase "practically free" eleven separate times.

"We are not trying to compete with anybody," Anhalt said. "We are trying to move 40 pounds of embroidery floss that a woman on Sunset Drive donated in March."

The Boutique Reaction

Downtown Waukesha's boutique corridor, a stretch of Broadway and St. Paul Avenue long known for storefronts advertising "closing sale, everything must go" signage that has, in several cases, remained in the same window for upward of six years, has reportedly not taken the news well. One proprietor, granted anonymity because she said she did not want "this quoted next to my actual prices," described Scraps and Sparks' model as "a fascinating experiment in losing money on purpose" and said she had personally walked through the store Wednesday "to see what we were dealing with," leaving, by her own account, with a bag of pom-poms she did not need.

Another boutique owner, reached by phone, said he had raised the matter informally with two other Broadway retailers over coffee and that the consensus was the thrift store's pricing was "not sustainable," a term he used four times without specifying for whom. When asked whether his own shop's decade-old closing sale banner was sustainable, he said that was "a completely different kind of sustainable" and ended the call.

"I've had my closing sale sign up since 2019. I am not going anywhere. That sign is not a promise, it's a mood."

— Downtown Waukesha boutique owner, speaking on background

City Weighs In, Cautiously

Councilman Gary Puchalski, asked whether the city had a position on nonprofit thrift retail undercutting for-profit boutique retail, said the city "does not regulate pricing philosophy" and that Scraps and Sparks had cleared the same zoning and occupancy requirements as any other Broadway storefront. Puchalski said he had visited the store personally and purchased a bin of assorted googly eyes for $1.25, which he described as "eyes I did not know I needed until I saw the price."

Anhalt said the store, staffed entirely by twelve volunteers on a rotating schedule, is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and currently accepts donations of paint, yarn, fabric scraps, beads, and "anything with googly eyes still attached." She said the nonprofit's board has discussed, but not approved, a proposal to add a "make an offer" bin for items that have sat unsold for more than 90 days, an idea she said one board member opposed on the grounds that "everything in this store is already an offer."

As of Friday, Scraps and Sparks reported total first-week sales of $612, a figure Anhalt called "extremely on pace" without specifying the pace or its origin. She said the store's most popular item so far has been a bin of assorted wooden dowels, sold by the inch, which she said moves "faster than anything a person could reasonably explain wanting that much of."

The downtown boutique owner who visited Wednesday said she planned to return for the dowels.