IOWA CITY

Alchemy: a seemingly magical process of transformation, creation, or combination.

There’s really no other way to say it: the people behind Crowded Closet perform alchemy. They take what others have discarded – trash, you could say – and use it to improve lives locally and around the world.

What’s interesting is, there is no mystical enchantment here. Crowded Closet, a thrift store in Iowa City, operates within the laws of human nature, under market forces. If there is some sort of supernatural force at work here, it must be . . .

Love?

God is in the details, as they say.

“There’s discovery every day at Crowded Closet,” volunteer coordinator Christine Maust Beachy told a group of prospective volunteers on Aug. 29. “Every day we encounter customers who are walking in the door for the first time and, wide-eyed, look around and say, ‘I’ve never seen a thrift shop like this. I love this place.’

“It’s discovery every day of donation receiving, where it’s like Christmas, opening the boxes and the bags of the generous items that folks in this community give to Crowded Closet, knowing that we’re going to turn every donation into money that’s going to help people.

“It’s discovery for staff and volunteers. We are about 400 volunteers, about 20 staff, and in a team that day, there’s almost always somebody who feels new, and we’re all discovering community life together and what it means to power this workshop as a body, as a team together,” she said.

What the group discovered that Thursday morning, on the organization’s first Discovery Day, is that there is a guiding principle at work behind all Crowded Closet does: “We do the most good that we can.” That means that value gets wrung out of every item donated to the store in order to maximize fundraising and do the most good in the community and the world.

To do that, the customer experience is always prioritized, down to the tiniest detail.

The clean and spacious retail space, located on Highway 6 in what was previously the Kmart building, is organized like a department store, complete with professional signage, clothing racks, and displays. Merchandise is rotated seasonally, so that Halloween costumes and fall clothes are out now, and Christmas trees and decorations will be out in a couple of months, exactly when shoppers will be looking for them.

Every electrical good is tested to be sure it works before it goes out on the sales floor. Broken goods are conserved as much as possible; if the team in the workshop finds a broken coffee maker with a perfect carafe, and a functioning coffee maker with a cracked carafe, they will combine the two intact halves to make a whole.

Volunteers will assemble every puzzle to make sure every piece is in the box. Fabrics will be measured and hung. Fabric scraps will be cut and pressed into fat quarters. Buttons will be sorted and carded.

Feather pillows are sanitized, reticked, and turned into brand new pillows.

Items of higher value get special treatment. Rare books are listed for sale online at Biblio.com. Fine jewelry, antiques, and musical instruments can be bid on in-house at the silent auction counter.

All of this “takes extra effort,” Maust Beachy said, but it’s important. All of these are examples of “our effort throughout operations to do the most good with every item that we’re trusted with.”

Customer service matters too.

“Everything we do at Crowded Closet, we are thinking about the customer. We are creating a customer experience, hopefully one they want to experience again and again,” Maust Beachy said. “We were so proud, just a couple years ago, to be awarded Best Retail Staff in all of Cedar Rapids and Iowa City. It’s a reflection of our mission making its way through our staff and volunteers who are creating that customer experience, the quality of the way the items are created and presented for our customers, that we receive that designation.”

Crowded Closet often wins accolades. In Iowa City, survey respondents often choose the store as their favorite place to shop for antiques. “Around the time of the pandemic, we won an award from the City of Iowa City for our work to support sustainable lifestyles,” Maust Beachy noted as well.

God is not just in the details at Crowded Closet, He is in the thrift store’s DNA. The endeavor began in 1978, when a handful of Mennonite women started a thrift shop on Gilbert Street in Iowa City.

“Our mission is to share God’s love and compassion in the name of Christ by supporting Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) world relief, service and development programs, as well as local community relief agencies. All the profits of the Crowded Closet go to support these relief and service organizations,” the store’s website explains.

Over the last 45 years, the store has grown, moving three times to keep up. It has raised over $8 million dollars to support relief through MCC, and despite only being at its current location a handful of years, is close to paying off its loan on the Kmart building, a fact that “makes the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up,” Maust Beachy said.

Volunteers are at the very heart of the store. They make an “incredible investment,” Maust Beachy said; “Think of how much more good and giving we’re able to do because people are giving the gift of their time.”

The items folks donate to Crowded Closet stay in the community. In addition to world relief, the store supports local community relief agencies and gives inventory to individuals and families in need in the neighborhood.

“We are transforming the consumerism and materialism that grips our culture into relief and development and peace,” Maust Beachy said. “Only a thrift shop can do it in this way.”

And there we have it. An alchemy made possible by love.

Support Crowded Closet by purchasing goods, donating items, or volunteering your time. The thrift shop is located at 851 Highway 6, Iowa City. Hours are Mon – Fri 9:30 a.m – 5 p.m., Sat. 9:30 a.m. – 4 p.m. Donation doors close 30 minutes before retail. Direct volunteer inquiries to crowdedcloset.volunteer@gmail.com or call 319-337-5924.