Few things in life make a young girl happier than a beautiful new dress, especially if the price is right — free of charge.
That’s the business model for Jill Rudman’s second annual Dress Boutique, which will open, probably briefly, Dec. 12 at Elm Place School in Highland Park. The giveaway dress shop, stocked with new and gently used dresses for low-income girls in grade school through high school, will do its best to duplicate the shopping experience of a commercial boutique, but without the cash register.
“I had no idea how it was going to work out last year,” said Rudman, a Highland Park native and Elm Place alum who won a 2015 Robert Barnard Character Counts award for organizing the event. “I was wondering what we would do with any dresses that were left over, but there wasn’t one left. In fact, it was all gone in less than 20 minutes.”
That’s not bad, considering there were hundreds of dresses in the boutique when its doors opened. And particularly impressive considering that the event was inspired by one dress donated by Rudman’s daughter Tatum the previous year as part of Elm Place School’s annual Day of Giving.
Dismayed by some torn and stained dresses she saw that year among the Day of Giving donations, Tatum had gone home and convinced her mother and sisters that they should donate prettier clothes of their own. So Rudman was pleased when a teacher told Tatum that a young girl at her church had proudly shown off one of Tatum’s dresses at a Christmas Eve service.
“I thought if one dress could make someone that happy, let’s get a hundred dresses next year,” said Rudman, who ended up collecting 400 after four months of outreach to friends, family and the community. It was so many that the Dress Boutique became a separate event a week after the school’s Day of Giving, as it will be this year.
Rudman is already at work on this year’s boutique, which she hopes will be an even bigger event. She’s hoping to convince local businesses to donate accessories such as handbags, purses and beauty supplies.
“I would love to have 600 this year or even more and I think that’s a reasonable expectation,” she said. “This is a very generous community and people are very willing to donate. They just need to know about it.
“And the fact is that there’s a lot of need here. We have a lot of kids in our schools who are at the poverty line or below and they’re going to school with kids from wealthy families. That can’t be easy. We all know how much girls love a new dress. So why not do something nice for some girls who can’t afford it?”
To arrange for a dress donation, contact Jill Rudman at [email protected]
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Jill Rudman’s Dress Boutique
Elm Place School, 2031 Sheridan Road, Highland Park
Dec. 12
Call (224) 765-3300 or see www.edline.net/pages/Elm_Place_School