Business View - March 2015 85
“My sister and I set out to kind of reinvent the resale
industry,” Scott Sloan said. “We were cash-strapped,
certainly conscious of the money we were spending on
things like fashion, but as a college student you want
to look nice and the social scene is important for a lot
of college folks. We saw the other options that were
out there in terms of resale shopping and nothing re-
ally resonated with us.
“Some of the places – some of our competitors – had
some of the products that we would buy and some
of the clothes that we would wear, but it felt like they
were kind of missing our mark. So when we set out
to create the Uptown Cheapskate brand we wanted to
target that young adult demographic. Not necessarily
a middle school or high school demographic, not nec-
essarily a college demographic, but we geared more
toward the college-age demo with the hopes that we
would still pick up the younger kids as they aspired to
be part of the cool brand that we’ve created.”
BaseCamp Franchising is the family-owned franchi-
sor apparatus that oversees both the Kid to Kid and
Uptown Cheapskate brands, and while the support
teams operate jointly and share a Salt Lake City head-
quarters facility – the executive management teams
remain separate and independent.
The set-up, he said, allows the benefits of working with
relatives while ensuring individuality, too.
“(Chelsea and I) both knew early on in our college
schooling that we at some point wanted to do our own
thing,” Scott Sloan said. “This was a great opportunity
for us to break off, create a new concept that we could
change some of the things in the culture of the way
that we do things at Uptown. The decisions that are
made over there aren’t necessarily made over here.
“Do we certainly learn from their mistakes and suc-
cesses? Yes. And vice versa. It’s been great to have
AT A GLANCE
WHO:
Uptown Cheapskate
WHAT:
Franchised thrift store that buys
and sells used clothes and accessories
WHERE:
Corporate headquarters in Salt
Lake City, Utah
WEBSITE
:
FRANCHISE
