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Small businesses really add to the character of a community, so we wanted to hear from a couple local small business owners. Today we’re getting insights and perspective from Krystell Theisen Escobar who started the Eco Chico and Soul aWear resale clothing stores.
“It’s been a tough year, to be honest, but we’re still here, and I’m learning a lot through solving those problems every day,” Theisen Escobar said.
These conversations come from our second members-only forum that we held in early October focused on small businesses with our guests, Sue Doyscher from Poppy & Wonderments and Krystell Theisen Escobar from Eco Chico and Soul aWear. These are members-only events, so join now to support local news and get an invite to our next member forum.
Meet Our Guest:
Krystell Theisen Escobar founded Eco Chico in 2023 and Soul aWear in 2026, cornering the local market on boutique resale clothing. Before Eco Chico, she worked in insurance. She’s lived in Mendota Heights with her husband and business partner and three boys—ages 7, 9, and 15—since 2015.
- Eco Chico is a resale kids clothing store located in Signal Hills on Robert Street in West St. Paul.
- Soul aWear is a second-hand clothing boutique focused on men’s and women’s fashion located near Smith and Annapolis in West St. Paul.
Insights
Here are a few highlights from our conversation and watch for part two with Sue Doyscher from Poppy & Wonderments.
Getting Started
- Supporting small business: Theisen Escobar’s roots were in product data and entrepreneurship and then more than a decade as a local insurance agent primarily helping other small businesses. About 80% were Latino. “I just really had a passion for helping other small business owners understand the scene, get some protection in place, and then learn about finances, credit, things like that that would help them out,” she said. “It really taught me a lot about small business and how to get started and how to build something from absolutely nothing because there’s been some amazing people that I got to work with through insurance that have really started from nothing and built a lot in this country and have contributed a lot here in our community.”
- Not in West St. Paul: Originally, Theisen Escobar considered a Once Upon a Child franchise. “They did not want to be in West St. Paul. They wanted to be in Woodbury or Eagan,” she said. “They showed us a lot of metrics why we should not do a resale store in West St. Paul—it was a bad idea, and of course I like to be contrary in that way.”
- Volume of donations: “It’s a lot of labor that we do there with clothing that we never anticipated we would get as much as we get. The traffic of people bringing us stuff—it’s crazy. We go through maybe 2,000 to 3,000 pieces of clothing every single day, and like probably a dozen pieces of baby equipment every single day, day in and day out.”
- So much laundry: “I do 300 pounds of laundry every single week,” Theisen Escobar said. She brings it to Clothesline Laundromat in West St. Paul where the two often partner.
- Value of secondhand: “People who regularly bring in their outgrown stuff, they could probably cover at least 30% of their cost just from the store credit that they get from outgrown things they bring in. And then our prices are consistently 60 to 70% off retail, so I mean you’re really talking significant savings for a family.”
- Reuse: Theisen Escobar is looking into a contract with the state to reuse fabrics as rags. “I’m looking into that as another potential recirculation thing because we do not go and put stuff in the trash ever,” she said. “We will never do that, and it’s hard with the abundance of synthetic stuff that we get.”
How’s Business?
- ICE impact: “Our third year now, we had a really rough start with the ICE occupation activity that really affected a lot of my organic market, which is Hispanic customers, and there’s definitely a very notable lack of traffic starting in December of last year. So this year, I feel like I had to put my finance hat back on and marketing hat back on to say, ‘Hey, I need to constantly be reaching out to a greater customer base.'”
- Starting Soul aWear: “Part of also dealing with a really tough situation over the winter, I just thought I got to put my energy and my angst into something creative because otherwise I’m going to be a really negative human being through all this. And so that’s when I just decided to be really bold. It wasn’t because we were doing so amazing at Eco Chico that we could just start investing in this other shop.”
Shop Local
- Shop local: “I think we need more things like that that draw people in to come and spend here, not just drive through, and that also encourage some of our own shoppers to stay in the neighborhood,” said Theisen Escobar. “Because part of what Winmark Corporation (Once Upon a Child) showed me with the franchise was that a lot of us go outside of West St. Paul, and most people will go to other commercial centers. It’s very detrimental for our local economy when we do that.”
- Supporting the community: “We do so much of the gift cards and this and that for all these local events and every kind of fundraiser and all the school groups fundraising. We give to them all and I never see chain places give them anything. It’s always the small, locally owned places that populate all those fundraisers and auctions and all that stuff. So it is really important [to shop local] because they’re just more in touch. There’s more understanding, like oh yeah, I have to support these schools. Like this is where we live.”
- Holiday shopping: “Now until the end of the year is really important for us, at least for Eco Chico, and I’m sure it’ll be for Soul aWear. It’s very key that we have a good end of the year.”
Making West St. Paul a Thrift Destination
- Thrift mecca: “I would love to see West St. Paul known for more than just fast food drive-throughs, but also known for being a thrifting, second-hand kind of mecca that would actually draw in traffic from outside the neighborhood.”
- Supporting more secondhand: “I really, really want to see secondhand be the destination thing,” Theisen Escobar said. “I do think that we still have too many vacancies, and this is a business model that can really work. There’s a few tools that people really need that generally independent resellers don’t figure out till too late in the game. And I would love to help anyone out with that. I’d love to have more more concepts come into the area. I think that would help us all for sure.”
- Possible expansion: “My hope is that I could expand actually to another Soul aWear shop not too far away, so that it’s not too hard on on my family life because I do have a lot of commitments there.”
- Standard of living: “I would really love for all these people to rise out of poverty and lack of resources, but how is everybody going to live like this if we all are going to learn to be really wasteful and to consume more than is really needed?” Theisen Escobar said. “I think that we here in this country have the obligation really to show them a way to live richly that is not going to really do all the damage to the environment.”
Marketing: What Works & How Can You Help
- Marketing: “I do have a marketing background, so I think that was the only thing that got us through year one because we discovered at Signal Hills there was not a lot of organic traffic there to work off of.”
- No phone: “We don’t have a phone at the Soul aWear shop on Smith either. Just come check it out. I finally put up a homepage last week because I do want it to feel more like, ‘Oh you know about us, oh how did you find out?’ A little bit more, kind of ‘in,’ and that’s a marketing strategy in and of itself too. Because you do want people to know it is something really special.”
- Online marketing: “Google reviews are the number one driver of new traffic, new customers coming, and our Google reviews are also what bring people in from the furthest out.”
- Tell people: “But then word of mouth, I would say, is the second—to just let people know.”
Business Advice to Share:
- Your one thing: “I would say for anyone starting out, that’s important to know what your bread and butter thing is that really gets you the right activity for your business.”
- Data: “I always tried to show them data about how money comes in because that’s really how I was trained. I was trained in sales and in marketing and my early career was actually a salesperson for Procter and Gamble, and I was in a sales development program with them, so I learned a lot about data and analysis to understand everything that you do,” said Theisen Escobar. “There’s always data points that you can start collecting to try to wrap your head around what’s the most potent activity to actually bring in cash flow?”
- Just ask: “Don’t be afraid to ask. Never be afraid to ask for what you need, because you’re always gonna need something. There’s always gonna be like something that’s like, oh, I’d love to go there, but that seems like kind of tough or tight. But you gotta ask around,” Theisen Escobar said. “I lobbied the city for, ‘oh please don’t make me pay 300 bucks for each of my business licenses when I had to renew them together,’ and it was January and our sales were awful, and then it was the ICE thing, and there was nobody coming. And you know, they actually lowered the licensing fee to $30. So there’s things like that where I’ve just learned, you know what, you gotta just knock on doors, ask, and just go for it.”
- Have confidence: “I think for me a big lesson is that I’ve spent too much money outsourcing several things that I could have done myself, but I think I didn’t believe I could do it myself.”
Big thank you to Krystell Theisen Escobar for attending our members-only forum and sharing her insights.
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