Parachute Brooklyn (151 Norman Ave.) is a new modern and vintage kids clothing store in Greenpoint that celebrated its opening in May.
Co-founders and Greenpoint residents for over a decade, Carly Boonparn and Ambra Markos met through the friendship between their 3-year-old daughters at school. “We’re both mothers of three-and-a-half-year-olds and having little babies you get a lot of hand-me-downs and a lot of presents,” Markos said. Boonparn worked as a manager at the local clothing trading chain, Beacon’s Closet for the past 15 years and Markos worked as a production manager for major fashion brands, making their business venture a natural progression.
Parachute Brooklyn operates as with a buy/sell/trade model with a variety of modern used clothes and vintage clothes dating back as far as the 1950s. “Because babies grow so fast from the age of newborn to four, they just go through their clothes soo quickly so it’s kinda just this cycle of clothes piling up and piling up,” Markos said, adding that it’s difficult to find one location to drop unwanted clothing an avoid it going into a landfill if it’s stained or damaged.
Sellers at Parachute Brooklyn are given the option to receive 25% of the retail value in cash or 50% in trade, and the store even has a donation drop-off site for stained or damaged pieces. “We don’t want people throwing away their clothes and them just ending up in a landfill, we want them to go into housing installation or be upcycled in some way,” Markos said.
Items that are not purchased for resale in-store will be donated to a variety of charities and recycling facilities. “Right now we’ve been giving the stained and damaged items to GrowNYC and they get them to the textile recycling facilities,” she said.
Another way Parachute is upcycling is by working with a local tie dying artist to transform stained or imperfect white clothing items into tie-dyed items.
The store will also host events for kids and parents from time-to-time with a live music singalong scheduled for every Tuesday morning in July.