![]() Where: Junket: Tossed & Found, an occasional shop, 4047 Minnehaha Ave. Share your own turning point with Molly Guthrey at or 65. I can say now that it was the best thing that ever happened to me - but it was also the hardest thing I’ve ever dealt with in my life.” “My ex-husband made a huge protagonist out of me,” she says. “To help beautiful things reclaim their value, that’s meaningful to me,” Kearns says. ![]() Some of the items may have been rescued from dumpsters, alleyways and the last-chance clearance aisles at the Goodwill. Shoppers will find everything from kitschy Christmas ornaments to a faux fireplace from the 1970s to vintage wool skirts. The store is open this weekend for one of its December sales. Who goes shopping after they get laid off? But I needed to kick it into high gear.”Ībout a year and a half later, in November 2012, Kearns opened an occasional shop, “Junket: Tossed & Found,” in the Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis. “Immediately after getting laid off, I picked up more inventory. “My severance gave me the runway I needed to take off,” Kearns says. She got her layoff - and her fresh start - in March 2011. They were not taking volunteers, but I went to my boss and said, ‘If my name is in the mix, let me make this difficult decision a little bit easier for you.'” “Literally, a week later, my company announced they had layoffs pending. Once I had gotten it up and running, I thought, ‘If I do this eBay thing and scale back my life in other ways, maybe I can quit my job six months from now.’ The clothes, accessories and shoes I sell go all over the world. I’ve had it up and running for nearly two years. I said, ‘You can do that?’ And so I started my own eBay shop. “Then I met a woman who was selling clothes on eBay. “Very gradually, I took on risk without digging into my cash reserves. “I started buying things that weren’t in my size but that I thought consignment stores would take,” she says. She continued to work her full-time corporate management job while building her own business. “Originally, we were trying to find a way to swing it where I could be a ‘mom first,’ but after my marriage ended, I realized it was going to be up to me to make that happen,” Kearns says. Kearns, who worked in the corporate world, wondered if she had found a way to be a “stay-at-home” mom to her daughter, Meridel, after all. ![]() ![]() I just wanted things that were not falling off me.” You can’t try clothes on there, but I didn’t need to. I bought my ‘new’ clothes at the cheapest place I knew - I went to the Goodwill Outlet at 280 and University, where you buy clothes by the pound. ![]() “So I took my pregnancy clothes and other clothes that had memories I couldn’t handle to consignment stores. “I had started buying my own clothes at the age of 12 - I was a thrifter teenager,” Kearns says. Turns out, it wasn’t a problem - it was the solution. I had also lost half of the household income - so I had no money for new clothes.” “I lost a ton of weight during that time - because I was nursing, I lost my pregnancy weight and also because I was not eating from the stress. “Almost immediately after giving birth to my daughter in September 2008, while dealing with the usual postpartum struggles, my life was dealt a crazy blow: The unexpected break up of my marriage,” says Kearns, 38, of Minneapolis. When Julie Kearns suddenly became a woman of reduced circumstances, a lifetime of thrifty shopping habits helped her repurpose her life. ![]()
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