Second time's the charm of Plato's Closet for teens

Teens are savvy shoppers and welcome secondhand items, observers say.
By JOAN VERDON
KNIGHT RIDDER TRIBUNE
STEVEN SCHECHTER FOLLOWED AN unusual business plan when he launched his new store, Plato's Closet in Paramus, N.J. For the first five weeks the store was open to the public, he handed out cash -- crisp $10s and $20s -- to his potential customers in exchange for their gently used jeans, sweaters and T-shirts.
He wouldn't sell them anything, no matter how much they pleaded.
But in late October, a lot of those customers returned to reinvest some of that money buying used clothes.
There's nothing new about secondhand stores, of course. Used music, books and lower-end clothes can all find a market. But Plato's, which sells top teen fashions in 97 stores nationwide, promotes secondhand as New Age and trendy.
The basis
The stores are banking on two facts of teen life: that teens will pay money for recycled clothes, and that teens are always looking for money to buy more clothes.
"Teens really, really by and large believe in recycling, and saving the earth," said Richard Brill, a spokesman for Plato's parent company. "They share clothes a lot; they trade clothes; they don't have any trouble buying something secondhand."
Especially, customers said in Paramus, if they can save lots of money doing just that.
Plato's Closet is one of the fastest-growing teen retail chains, but Schechter's store is the first to open in the New York metropolitan area, and a brand-new concept in Paramus, a shopping destination for affluent consumers who spent $3 billion in the borough last year.
The customers
Last month, when the store began selling clothes, shoppers like Donna Bellofatto of Fair Lawn, N.J., were waiting outside to buy bargains such as Seven jeans for $22 or Adidas sneakers in one of today's teen power colors -- powder blue -- for $7.
"I'm like a stalker -- I'm stalking those pants," said Bellofatto, who had her eye on a particular pair of size 0 Levi's for her 12-year-old daughter and was waiting outside the store just before 10 a.m.
The teens who are the store's target customers were in school this particular morning, but within 20 minutes of opening, the store was bustling with lots of twentysomethings and the mothers of teenagers.
"It's a wonderful concept for teenagers," Paramus mother Janet Krakowski said. "One minute they love something, and the next minute they won't wear it."
Savvy shoppers
Retail watcher Candace Corlett said the store could be in the right time and the right place to take advantage of some powerful teen spending trends.
"Kids have become such smart shoppers. They are trading up their cameras and their Palm Pilots on eBay," she said, and are used to looking for used merchandise in good condition. "It's a new culture," said Corlett, a partner in WSL Strategic Retail, a market research company in Manhattan.
The challenge, Corlett said, will be "can they keep up the buzz? You need people to go in every week to see what they've got that's new."