“Everything Must Go,” said the sign on the door of Rags to Riches in Cordele, Ga., and Vicky Szuflita could not resist taking a look inside.
The women’s clothing store contained multitudes — shoulder pads, vintage brooches, old denim faded by years of sunlight shining through the window and floral A-line skirts that fit just so. Also, gowns. “There were so many sequins,” Ms. Szuflita said. “I wanted all of them.”
The store, however, kept just a few regular hours and soon shut its doors permanently. The clothes remained, and many months later, she taped a handwritten request to the door. Could she somehow get inside and buy just a few more things?
Another few months went by before the new owner of the building replied. He seemed to have little interest in retail or the inventory that the previous owners had inexplicably left behind.
Eventually, he did open a line of communication, and Ms. Szuflita’s hankering for one last shot at the racks suddenly evolved. He let her take a look inside, and last year, she summoned up the nerve to make an ask: What if everything did in fact go? Could she take the entire contents of the store off his hands?
A Spare House in Georgia
As a teenager in Brooklyn, Ms. Szuflita, who is 31, had a passing fancy for fast fashion, but she preferred to outfit herself with stoop-sale finds. In high school, she gravitated to items from vintage stores like Beacon’s Closet, a beloved New York City mini-chain.
She studied cognitive science in college and eventually went to work in politics as a data science specialist. Campaign work took her to swing states like North Carolina and Georgia, where she and her boyfriend, Ryan Ash, moved in early 2021.
They eventually settled in Albany, where they paid $170,000 for two houses in 2023, because in some parts of the country a second house comes free with the first. One is across the backyard from the other, on a plot surrounded by unoccupied homes and luxuriant trees that do not grow in Brooklyn.
Ms. Szuflita first shopped at Rags to Riches after attending a performance in downtown Cordele, about 40 miles northeast of Albany. “I was immediately taken,” she said, adding: “When you go to bigger cities, really cool vintage is almost competitive. Here, I could go and get whatever I wanted.”
After the store had closed permanently but before it had occurred to Ms. Szuflita to ask after the inventory, a “For Sale” went up on the building. She and Mr. Ash considered buying it. The second floor looked like it could yield some nice loft-style apartments with a bunch of work.
Pretty quickly, however, they realized that the project would require too much effort and expense. So Ms. Szuflita turned her attention to its contents. Why were all the clothes still there?
The previous building owners were also the store’s proprietors. The mainstay of Rags to Riches was once a Miss Paula, which was how she was known around town. But where was this Miss Paula? There were rumors of a Walmart sighting but also speculation that she might be dead.
As I interviewed Ms. Szuflita, I scribbled a note to myself. “Find Miss Paula?”
The closed store’s abandoned clothes sat undisturbed on the other side of the display windows for months. “I was kind of emotionally invested,” Ms. Szuflita said. “If they were planning on leaving the clothes in a dumpster, I wanted to know.”
The new owner of the building had questions for her, too. “He wanted to know if I was a store,” she said.
Ms. Szuflita had no physical retail space, but she had a spare house. She had digital savvy and a phone with a camera. And, thanks to her low cost of living and a boyfriend with whom she shared expenses, she had some savings.
Several months later, she got inside the store again with the intention to make an offer for a bunch of things for herself. “But I saw so much that was interesting,” she said. “There were quite a few evening gowns and wedding dresses. Just based on the variety of clothing, I knew it was valuable, just from the inherent value of things being quirky.”
The new owner was ready to renovate and wanted everything out. Ms. Szuflita took the hint and made an offer, paying $4,500 — which turned out to be a single dollar bill for each item in the inventory.
The owner accepted, and then she was indeed a store. Or something. But not immediately.
‘Now We’re in It’
How many data scientists and supportive boyfriends does it take to empty out a two-story building with no air-conditioning? The pair had three days over Memorial Day weekend in 2024, a borrowed church van and a U-Haul.
There were clothes on the second floor in rooms Ms. Szuflita had not known about. Plastic hangers disintegrated on contact, at which point it became clear that some of the clothing hadn’t been touched in decades.
She tried to keep track of what she was packing that wasn’t on racks, and she didn’t quite succeed.
“I got a bit delirious,” Ms. Szuflita said. “I had this sheet where I was writing down the number of items, their general type and a bag number. I ended up with 92 giant bags, with index cards on them. It was a very terrible data collection method.”
Still, they got everything out by nightfall on Day 3 and loaded it all into several rooms in the house at the back of their property. “I woke up every morning thinking that I had made the biggest mistake of my life,” Ms. Szuflita said. “And then I said: ‘Vicky, this is going to be worth it. And it’s too late now — we’re in it.’”
To test what the collection might be worth, she took select pieces to the stores she once haunted in New York. A Buffalo Exchange employee told her that it was not the “silhouette” the store was looking for, but Beacon’s Closet took about 30 items for $6 each.
Months later, she was in Los Angeles, and a plus-size boutique, Proud Mary Fashion, bought another pile of goods. This year, she sold 40 prom dresses at a pop-up sale on the block where she had grown up and walked away with $1,733.96.
“It was proof of concept for me,” she said. “The clientele is going to be specific.” Indeed, buyers were partial to simple, classic styles and not the more eccentric items that were on display.
Since then, Ms. Szuflita has been building what she now refers to as a fashion-brand-in-reverse, in part on a platform called Whatnot. One part QVC, one part TikTok live, with a bit of Etsy idiosyncrasy mixed in for good measure, it allows her to run 30-second auctions and then bill and ship via the same platform.
Five months ago, in a room in her main house in Albany that she had reworked for the night into a broadcast studio of sorts, she made her debut. The conceit — announced several days in advance on her Instagram page and to whomever Whatnot’s algorithms had found for her — was that she was going to open two mystery bags from her Rags to Riches haul. Then she would sell all of the items they contained, piece by piece, to the highest bidder.
An hour before start time, Ms. Szuflita and two friends, Christine Belcher and Miriam Edwards, changed into evening gowns they had chosen from the inventory. At the appointed time, they stared into an iPhone camera and pulled the first item from a black trash bag.
There were surprises. An orange T-shirt with additional fabric, embroidery and little crystals all arranged into a watermelon collar and a bunch of grapes at the sternum is not something you see every day. And where else would you even hunt for a coral pantsuit with embroidered flowers in a fabric that looks like linen but wears like rayon?
Ms. Szuflita, in a hot pink backless number fringed in gold, gamely played the straight woman while addressing the faceless masses out in the Whatnot ether. Ms. Edwards, wearing blue-green all the way to the floor, was the ham.
“We have all the fruits!” she said of the T-shirt.
“I’ve seen that before on my first-grade teacher,” she said of a two-piece tan outfit.
“The shoulder pads,” she said of something that must have been born in approximately 1986. “You could sleep on this!”
“How often can you say that you got something from an abandoned store in Georgia?”
Not often, but by the time the evening was over, there were a few more people who could. The sale grossed $677.
And Ms. Szuflita hadn’t even gotten to most of the good stuff. So much depends on taste, but someone would presumably want the wedding and bridesmaid dresses. The white pantsuits with gold buttons that scream Sergeant Pepper would surely find a loving home.
There were mysteries, too, gorgeous ones. What or who had been the original intended destination for the brightly colored work coats from Best Manufacturing? Hospital candy stripers? Jockeys? Traders in the Chicago commodities pits? And why were they strewn among the sensible suits, anyway? Unlike much of the inventory, they didn’t even have hand-penciled price tags.
The Missing Miss Paula
Ms. Szuflita wondered about all of this. When she had visited the store as a customer, the woman working there was not the original owner. And the new owner had said nothing to her about the abandoned inventory’s circumstances.
My search of the public records suggested that a woman named Paula Lowery might still be walking the earth, just off Cemetery Road several miles outside the center of Cordele.
Ms. Lowery did not respond to my messages, at least at first. As I was about to leave town, I gave it one last try.
This time, a quiet voice answered the phone. “There are so many scams on TV,” she said. “I was just leery.”
The next morning, Ms. Szuflita paid a social call on Ms. Lowery and her husband, Wilbur, so that everyone could hear everyone else’s stories.
Ms. Szuflita brought flowers and was wearing them, too, printed on a purple dress drawn from the Rags to Riches stock. Ms. Lowery had her own floral get-up from the store that she and her husband once owned.
The retail operation was born in 1991, when Ms. Lowery decided she wanted a change after 29 years working for a bank. Her main wholesale supplier was in Atlanta, and she ordered dresses and suits from catalogs.
“I didn’t like the ones that were too short, and I didn’t like the ones that were too revealing,” she said.
But she was not picky. When other stores closed, she would buy from their remaining inventory. And when the Cordele Uniform Company went under, she purchased items from its warehouse. That was where the beautiful jackets had come from.
In early 2020, while approaching the casket at a friend’s funeral, Ms. Lowery took a spill. Before she hit the ground, she heard her femur snap.
Surgery followed, plus a long recovery that was delayed by another fall that led to a broken pelvis. Heart trouble persisted. When her primary employee decided not to take the business over once the coronavirus pandemic had receded, the couple put the building up for sale.
They wanted a clean break, and they got one with the eventual buyer. “I said that when I give you the key, I’m walking out,” Mr. Lowery said. “I don’t want nothing to do with it no more. I’d done moved the store two times already.”
The pair had wondered what happened to the clothes. Someone had told them about the U-Haul, but they never found out who had been driving it until Ms. Szuflita came to show them pictures of what had become of everything.
“Did you get a good deal on it?” Mr. Lowery asked her.
By then, Ms. Szuflita was close to breaking even, purely on the numbers. There was sweat equity, sure, but the value of the still unfolding adventure also counted for something.
“I got a good deal,” she said. “Yes sir.”
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
Ron Lieber has been the Your Money columnist since 2008 and has written five books, most recently “The Price You Pay for College.”
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