Goodwill plans to open a store and donation center in a Wauwatosa building, and a boutique store featuring high end donated items in the Third Ward.
Goodwill Industries of Southeastern Wisconsin Inc. plans to open a store and donation center in a Wauwatosa building, and a boutique store featuring high end donated items in Milwaukee’s Historic Third Ward.
Goodwill is a non-profit organization that provides education, training, and career services for people with disadvantages, such as welfare dependency, homelessness, and lack of education or work experience, as well as those with physical, mental and emotional disabilities. Goodwill has more than 2,200 retail stores in the country. Revenues from the stores fund job training and other services to help prepare clients for work.
Goodwill Industries purchased a 65,240-square-foot industrial building at 12121 W. Feerick St., Wauwatosa, from Feerick Investments LLC for $2.4 million. RFP Commercial brokers Paul McBride, Bob Flood, and Scott Revolinski represented the seller in the building sale transaction. Goodwill is renovating the building into a store and donation center.
Goodwill has several stores in the Milwaukee area, but none are in Wauwatosa.
"We based (the decision to open a Wauwatosa store) on donor zip code studies," said Goodwill spokeswoman Cheryl Lightholder "We were finding that Wauwatosa was really an underserved market."
Goodwill also plans to open a boutique store, called Retique, at 190 N. Broadway in the Third Ward. The 5,343-square-foot space was formerly occupied by the Private Gardner store.
The store will open in May. It will be the first boutique store for Goodwill Industries of Southeastern Wisconsin, but Goodwill organizations in other parts of the country have had success operating boutique stores like this that sell high end donated items, Lightholder said.
For more information, OnMilwaukee.com, a media partner of BizTimes Milwaukee, also has a report on Goodwill’s Third Ward store.
OnMilwaukee.com also has a report on another new store coming to the Third Ward: Quality Candy/Buddy Squirrel.
