The boutique that bet on the Valley

On the morning Emerson Park Resale opened its doors, Ashley Greeff was quietly bracing for disappointment.

She had left a decade-long career at Vancouver’s high-end consignment institution Turnabout. She had a newborn at home. She had walked away from a partnership in White Rock. And she had signed a lease in Chilliwack, a city more than a few people gently questioned.

“Have I made a horrible mistake?” she remembers thinking.

By noon, there was a lineup for the fitting rooms nearly two hours long.

“We didn’t stop,” she says. “It was the craziest day.”

Nearly two years later, Emerson Park Resale has become one of the anchor retailers in District 1881, a contemporary-to-luxury consignment boutique that feels more curated Vancouver than small-town strip mall. Polished racks of Aritzia and Reformation sit alongside Chanel bags and impeccably authenticated designer pieces. The space is bright, intentional, and unmistakably confident.

But Greeff didn’t stumble into resale.

She’s been working in retail since she was 18. Born in Williams Lake to a South African father and Scottish mother, she grew up partly in White Rock and spent time living in England and Lithuania before settling back on the West Coast. Fashion and brands weren’t just an interest, they were an obsession.

For nearly ten years, she worked at Turnabout, eventually running the buying department across eight stores. She trained buyers. She handled authentication. She managed intake and resale pricing for luxury goods long before resale became algorithm-friendly or searchable online.

“It wasn’t like I just woke up and was like, I want to open a store,” she says. “This is really what I’ve been doing my whole life.”

When she left in 2020, it was in the thick of COVID. She gave birth in 2021 and, just four months postpartum, opened her first independent consignment shop in White Rock with a partner. It was successful out of the gate, but something else had caught her eye.

Chilliwack.

Her brother and sister-in-law had urged her to visit District 1881, the European-inspired redevelopment transforming a historic stretch of downtown into a walkable retail and restaurant corridor. She didn’t quite believe the hype at first.

“I didn’t quite believe her that Chilliwack could be cool,” she laughs. “But as soon as I went there, I was like, no — this is something really special.”

Every visit revealed a new store, a new restaurant, a new sign of momentum. She reached out to the developers almost casually to ask if space was available. Within days, she was reviewing floor plans.

She spent a full year building Emerson Park from her home before opening in June 2024.

In that year, she and her longtime collaborator Leah Jones — now the store’s director — drove out to Chilliwack regularly. They introduced themselves to neighbouring businesses. They shot social media content. They built relationships. Jones, who had worked with Greeff at Turnabout as a teenager, would sit across from her in her living room mapping out inventory systems and content plans.

By opening day, there was already a small community waiting.

The demand surprised even Greeff.

Today, the store operates with a team of eight staff, most of whom live in Chilliwack or nearby Rosedale. The business has become known not just for its racks of luxury and contemporary brands, but for its deeply personal intake process. Unlike traditional retail, where inventory arrives in boxes from suppliers, consignment requires constant relationship-building.

“You’re running two businesses,” Greeff explains. “The sales floor world, and the intake world.”

Inventory isn’t guaranteed. Every piece must be evaluated for authenticity, condition, resale value and demand. Pricing luxury resale isn’t something you can simply Google, especially when dealing with fluctuating brand popularity and shifting consumer tastes.

“It takes a year to really learn what we do,” she says of training staff. “There’s so much grey area.”

There are the typical retail challenges — staffing, loss prevention, the occasional attempted theft — but consignment adds emotional stakes. These are personal belongings. If something is mis-tagged or damaged, the implications are personal, not just financial.

That complexity hasn’t slowed growth. If anything, it has sharpened it.

By late 2025, Emerson Park was running out of space. Greeff briefly explored opening a second location in another city but found the process messy and misaligned. Then, in a chance conversation with developer Dave Algra of Algra Bros., an idea was floated: what if she opened another store just steps away?

Within four days, paperwork was signed. Two weeks later, she opened Emerson Park & Rec, a more everyday, athleisure-forward concept that also introduced menswear into the mix.

If Emerson Park is about curated luxury and occasion dressing, Parks & Rec leans into elevated daily and outdoor wear — Lululemon, The North Face, relaxed pieces, approachable brands that make sense for Valley lifestyles. The second store solved a space problem but also broadened the brand’s reach.

Underneath it all is something more grounded: community economics.

Consignment isn’t just retail. It’s redistribution. Clients bring in pieces. They receive payment or credit. Those dollars cycle back into local spending.

“We’re actually benefiting the community,” Greeff says. “People come sell their items. We love it when they shop at the same time; but it’s benefiting both ways.”

District 1881 amplifies that ecosystem. Business owners share a group chat to flag issues, promote sales, and support one another, a level of collaboration Greeff says she’s never seen elsewhere.

“Being an entrepreneur can be lonely,” she says. “The way District has been structured, it’s been really nice.”

In June, Emerson Park will celebrate its two-year anniversary. There will almost certainly be a party.

If opening day proved anything, it’s that Greeff’s instinct — honed over two decades of resale — was right.

She didn’t just open a store in Chilliwack.

She saw what it was becoming, and arrived just ahead of the crowd.