St. Vincent de Paul thrift store moving to larger Wheaton Way location

A store that's been well used as a home of used things in West Bremerton has a new site — at an East Bremerton storefront shoppers had been used to finding those used goods for years.

St. Vincent de Paul's white collection trucks have been busy making the runs from Bremerton's Callow Avenue across the bridge to the Wheaton Mall this week. That's where volunteers are unloading and setting up the stock of the St. Vinny's thrift store for the opening of a new, much larger location at the former home of Henery Do It Best Hardware.

SVP leadership thinks shoppers will be drawn to the increased floor space — now approximately 18,000 feet to showcase clothes, furniture, toys and more on department store shelving donated by JC Penney — as well as amenities like a dramatically larger parking lot, foot traffic from neighboring businesses and frontage facing a much busier street.

But the intangible factor is a sense of what Kate Silva, director of giving of St. Vincent de Paul, called a "thrifter's paradise" — joining the Habitat for Humanity store and Vintage Flip Consignment in the same plaza, Goodwill just a few blocks north and the memory of the former Value Village, which was at the same location of 3449 Wheaton Way until closing in 2013.

"We want to keep as many of our regulars," Joe Crain, executive director of St. Vincent de Paul, said about the new location, "but open up to a whole new clientele."

St. Vincent de Paul's longtime thrift store at 1117 Callow Ave. is part of the organization's sprawling but aging complex just north of 11th Street that also includes a food bank, assistance center and a small amount of temporary housing in the middle of a residential neighborhood. Crain said St. Vinny's has always treated its thrift store as a place to meet basic needs — "the clothier for the homeless in this county," he called it — but it no longer penciled out financially as customer traffic cratered after the pandemic hit.

The potential for financial growth in a larger and more accessible store will allow that mission to survive, Crain said, and allow the store to become a more integral part of other SVP goals, like job training and staff development. The thrift store will add six employees to its existing team of 16 workers, including several adults with special needs from the Holly Ridge Center who had previously volunteered with the organization.

Additionally, the old SVP white delivery vans that used to do collection of donations will return, a result of the new location's expanded storage space to accept used items from the community, and a loading dock behind the facility will provide donors with a simpler process than at the cramped Callow location.

St. Vinny's menagerie of items should be ready for shoppers by next week, Crain said, with a grand opening of the store planned for April.

This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: St. Vincent de Paul moving its thrift store to East Bremerton