DuBOIS — The end of casual wear sales at Nicole’s Niche in downtown DuBois has been a long time coming, co-owner Cindy Powers said. But the idea to ship the store’s casual inventory to Texans affected by Hurricane Harvey came to her and her daughter Nicole, for whom the store is named, only recently.
“We just started talking about how we have all this stuff; it’s summer wear. We’ve heard that people have been donating – which is awesome – winter clothes to Texas, and they don’t need those clothes,” co-owner Nicole Powers, 24, of DuBois, said. “All of our clothes right now are all stuff that women are going to need in the hot season.”
Plus, Cindy Powers, 54, of DuBois said, friends and former DuBois residents Mary Beth and George McClain told her over the phone that they lost their Houston home to the storm.
“Their house is just totally submerged,” she said. “She went to Walmart to buy clothes and could not even find any. It’s wiped out down there.”
Cindy Powers described her store as a consignment shop selling “anything a woman can put on her body.”
This isn’t the first time she and Nicole have given away clothing for free: they previously established a prom gown giveaway in the memory of family friend and Treasure Lake resident Brittany Baird, who died in 2015, and have donated to the non-profit Community Action, Inc.’s local domestic violence program.
The two had been planning on ending sales of casual wear in favor of formal wear for some time. Sales of casual wear have dwindled over the past couple of years, Cindy Powers said, and hit a low last winter.
“They walk right past it and go to the formal wear,” Nicole Powers said.
Now they’ve got about 800 articles of clothing they plan to ship down to the McClains, who Cindy Powers said are currently staying in Beaumont, Texas, with their extended family.
The McClains, Cindy Powers said, will distribute the clothing themselves, hopefully avoiding the misplacement that can sometimes occur with donations to large charitable organizations. As of Wednesday night, the Powers were trying to calculate how much it would cost to ship all those clothes. They hope to have them on the road by Saturday.
Since all of the clothes donated came from consigners, Nicole Powers said she feels particularly proud of her neighbors for making the donation possible. ”We wouldn’t be able to do this without the community,” she said.
