Double Take Consignment shop opens in downtown St. Charles

The name of the store is the perfect fit.

For one, the Double Take Consignment shop at 122 W. Main St. is a play on words for taking notice and making use of clothing a second time. But because owner Tammi Rojek has opened her shop in such a prominent corner of downtown St. Charles, it also is cause for a double-take when passing by and seeing a new business there.

And that's part of what drew Rojek down to St. Charles to open her second Double Take Consignment shop to complement one she operates in Crystal Lake.

“I have always loved historic buildings, so I just love this building,” Rojek said. “It may sound weird, but I love the basement part of the building too.”

The building site at the corner of Main Street and North Second Street (Route 31) has long been a cornerstone for retail in St. Charles. For decades, it housed Colson's clothing store. It was heavily damaged by a Christmas Day fire in 1933 and rebuilt for Colson's. The site eventually became the Vertical Drop Ski and Patio Shop in 1987. When Vertical Drop closed in 2013, a business called Sportiva operated for a short time, and then Stanbridge Master Saddlers took over there.

Area residents can now consider Double Take another entry in the local consignment shop arena - a factor Rojek views as positive.

“I love the consignment shops in Geneva, as my girlfriends and I would always go,” said Rojek, who recently moved to West Chicago and wanted to operate a store closer to where she lives. “I want people to add my store to their local consignment shopping list.”

Rojek believes local consignment stores can help each other. “If I don't have an item, I can let shoppers know about the other consignment shops in the area.”

Rojek has operated consignment stores for the past decade, making a life's work from a passion she established in college and had a sister working as a missionary in France.

“I went to school on the North Shore, and I would go to all of the consignment stores there, buy a lot of clothes and ship them to France,” she said. “I fell in love with consignment shops then and had thought about opening a Once Upon a Child (franchise) store, but decided to open my own instead.”

Double Take Consignment had its soft opening last week, and Rojek is looking at late January for a grand opening “party” to take place over a three- or four-day period.

“I want to get all of the little issues worked out, and I want to have a full inventory, and that takes time with consignment because you have to have the drop-offs,” Rojek said.

It won't take long to fill the 5,400 square feet in the store, Rojek added. “My store in Crystal Lake is 6,500 square feet, and it is jam-packed,” she said.

For women, children, and younger men looking for consignment clothing, the Double Take Consignment should be filled and operating at full efficiency in another month.

It will have to start with new phones at the store.

“I'm all about consignment, so I was trying to use old phones from a previous store, and they were not working,” Rojek said. “So, I have to get out and get new phones.”

Snopko, socks tandem

It would not surprise me if Wyatt and Porter Snopko of St. Charles eventually became sock manufacturers. After all, “Snopko Socks and Underwear” is entering its fifth year of collecting new socks, underwear and masks to deliver to the Lazarus House and Hesed House homeless shelters.

St. Charles tabbed Wyatt, 14, and Porter, 13, the city's youths of the year in 2021, for helping their community after the two collected 2,500 pairs of donated socks last year in the collection bin in front of their house at 612 Fellows St.

It might be a challenge to reach that amount this year, only because the project got off to a slower start because the boys' mother, Nicole Snopko, has been undergoing breast cancer surgeries and treatments.

“Wyatt is optimistic that they can still collect as many socks this year, so we are hoping he is right,” Nicole said.

In the past, the collection ended on Christmas Eve, but the boys have decided to keep it going into early January this year to make up for the slower start, Nicole added.

Since the boys started this process as Richmond Elementary School students, they likely have delivered between 5,000 and 6,000 pairs of new socks.

On to the next phase

If you spot me walking around a grocery store in pajama pants, or dining in a place like the Costco food court, or eating at any number of Italian beef joints in the area, you should know these are things that could easily happen to an older fellow when he retires.

I've been officially retired from my full-time job at American Banker for a week now, ending a 45-year career in full-time journalism that started in Elburn in 1977 at a newspaper called Chronicle West.

After covering schools, police, local government and sports, and then managing newsroom employees and budgets for 25 years, I moved onto a marketing and sales job for a short time, and then to the past 10½ years with American Banker reporting on the payments and data security industries.

I've also plugged away as a freelancer in doing this “Talk of the Town” column for the past 18 years for the Daily Herald, an enjoyable task that I will keep doing.

I've worked on this column on weekends and evenings to avoid conflict with my full-time jobs, so it will be good for my stress levels and the column itself to add available hours.

Recently, a common question has been, “What are you going to do now?”

First, I thought retiring meant you didn't need to answer a question like that. My plans are simple now, especially during another COVID-laced winter.

Social media is an intoxicating lure, but I want to avoid getting pulled into unpleasant conversations. They are stupid and not worth the time.

It is fun to engage on topics with friends and share photos and such, but I often see hateful, unnecessary, and uneducated comments. A lot of people like that stuff, apparently. I do not.

It's not worth the time or effort to engage in political debates after doing it so often in my career with candidates at local, state and federal levels.

Those are the people you want to debate with. Go to a candidates' forum or write letters to candidates or elected officials. Don't waste time banging heads on social media with someone whose vote is no more important than your own.

It's way more important and more valuable for me to spend time with the grandkids, take long walks, play a little more golf, clean out stuff in the house to make donations, and engage with organizations that help people.

dheun@sbcglobal.net