Beautiful Lives Boutique held its fourth-annual “Shop Our Closet” event from Nov. 8 to 11.
Beautiful Lives Boutique partners with the Greek Life chapters at the University of Arkansas to put on this event.
Each sorority at the U of A donates clothes to Beautiful Lives and then Beautiful Lives will have members of the sorority come in and help sort the clothing for them to be put out on the floor.
“What we do is partner with all the Greek houses on campus,” said Nicole Roberts, the store manager at Fayetteville Beautiful Lives Boutique. “They did a huge donation drive for us, and this year all Panhellenic sororities participated. They come in and their house gets to serve so they get to volunteer and process what they donated and then it goes out on the floor.”
Beautiful Lives Boutique was founded in 2016 by Melody Taylor. It all started because she said she wanted to raise money for her family to go on missions to Africa.
Taylor started by doing epic garage sales, and in one night she made over $12,000 doing a closet swap. A closet swap is a process where you exchange the clothes you wish to part with for someone else’s clothes that they also want to discard. After this, she decided to bring it to Fayetteville where her kids went to college. Taylor partnered with New Heights Church to create the Beautiful Lives Boutique.
“Our whole mission is to lift women and mend the community,” Roberts said.
Beautiful Lives Boutique does this by selling clothes at a discounted price so different types of clothing are accessible to all.
To make it even more exciting, Beautiful Lives makes “Shop Our Closet” competition for the sororities.
Nov. 8 was the first day of the event, over 4,000 pieces of clothes hit the floor. Whichever sorority sells the most of their clothes gets 25% of the sales back to their philanthropy.
Dana Fields, the Community Engagement at Beautiful Lives Boutique manager, said she is excited for the event and how much it is growing.
“It’s also growing a lot from awareness in the community. We even had a line at the door,” Fields said. “The parking lot was completely packed and it’s really a lot of fun to have that partnership with sororities. We were able to share the Beautiful Lives mission.”
This year’s winner of the 2023 “Shop Our Closet” event was Phi Beta Phi.
To learn more visit: https://www.beautifullivesboutique.com/