By Hayden Choate
@choatehayden
When Madison Daly, Springfield College’s No. 2 women’s soccer defenseman, has the ball on the field, she hears her teammates calling for her to pass it to them. Only instead of saying, Madison or Madi, they shout two letters.
“CT! CT!”
A nickname that’s for Connecticut’s abbreviation, but not because that’s its home state.
Daly has a popular second-hand clothing business she runs on Instagram called “CT Thrifts” which earned her the nickname.
“We’ve all kind of learned to call him ‘CT’ this season, mostly because there’s a lot of Madisons on our team, ironically,” teammate Karly Suppicich said. “I personally can’t remember the last time I called her Madi or Madison because yelling ‘CT’ in the hallway or in the middle of a game feels right to me.”
The nickname dates back to high school when Daly started his savings account. Initially, she was nervous about her friends finding out at first.
“I remember being so nervous when I started it. I didn’t even tell my best friend because I was embarrassed to fail,” Daly said. “In my hometown everyone calls me that, I could be at the grocery store and I’d hear someone say ‘CT!’ and it’s funny because I just did it because I live in Connecticut, and I keep forgetting that it literally means Connecticut.
Daly started her business when she was a junior in high school. Combining a passionate hobby she’s been doing since a young age with an idea she once had.
“When I was younger, I used to go savings all the time with my grandma and it was just a fun thing I always did with her,” Daly said. “No one was as interested as me and I was saving up on my own and one day I remember finding this Champion hoodie and I thought I wouldn’t wear it but someone else would wear it. would do.”
After coming up with the idea of selling the clothes she would find at various thrift stores, it first took a bit of trial and error.
“I kind of just started thinking about ideas, I started selling on Poshmark but that wasn’t what I wanted it to be. I kind of wanted to create my own thing, so I created an Instagram account,” Daly said.
Rather than having to browse an entire website and manage a shopping cart, shoppers can purchase things by simply commenting on one of Daly’s posts — a process people loved from the get-go.
“It was a smash hit because it was so new and everyone was like, ‘Oh, that’s so cool, I’ve never seen anything like that on Instagram,’ so honestly, I didn’t never had to build it,” Daly said.
Suppicich, who is not only her teammate and friend but also a frequent customer, learned about the account before she knew Daly when she was also in high school.
“All my friends were buying stuff from him and I was like I just had to check it out,” Suppicich said. “Sometimes I probably buy too much and can’t look at his page for a week to save money.
The way it works is that Daly will take place on a day where she goes to about five or six different stores. She then takes pictures of the items and makes drafts of them so she can post them when she “drops off” all the clothes she has purchased.
“So today I’m going to save money, then when I get back I’ll take all my photos, I’ll go to training and then after training I’ll do all my drafts so I’ll filter them and put a caption. So I save them later after dinner, post them, and then the bidding continues for 24 hours, but you can BIN (buy now) an item at full price anytime,” Daly said.
Balancing school, being a full-time athlete, and running her own business is tough, but Daly makes sure she sticks to a routine to succeed.
“I think I set myself a day to do it, and my class schedule, I made sure I didn’t have a lot of soccer to start with, even though school comes first. I made sure I had time to do it too because it’s like my job, I don’t have a job that is my job. One day to save money and post a delivery, then another day to ship all orders.
“Somehow she still manages to find time for it and keep the quality of what she puts on her page just as high,” Suppicich said.
Being able to keep your balance became very difficult – one day Daly played a game and then had a fall of clothes she was selling.
A few weeks ago, Daly posted a message that CT thrift stores would be doing a clothing drop at 10 p.m., but before his team faced Babson in a night game at 7 p.m. The game went into double overtime with Daly playing the full 110 minutes and the game ending around 9:30 a.m. giving him nearly 30 minutes to make his downfall.
“I remember I looked at the clock, and all my teammates are in there and they’re all buying stuff and we were like, ‘Oh my god, it’s 9:30 a.m., I have a 10:00 a.m. delivery,'” he said. Daly said.
“I took all my photos but I hadn’t done any drafts and it takes me about an hour so we were all sitting in the locker room they were all helping me and they were like, ‘What the hell is this? that you want it to be at the price of? ‘”
Even though her company is young, like other companies, she had to adapt to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even though online shopping was reaching new heights, not being able to get to thrift stores was a big deal.
“My biggest thing was that the thrift stores were closed and I didn’t know what I was going to do, so I started buying [clothes] people on Zeepop and Poshmark or Facebook Marketplace… they will sell a lot of clothes, [and] I’m going to buy 50 hoodies for 50 bucks,” Daly said.
“For months, until the thrift stores opened, I was basically online every day on my computer ordering things. lots of subscribers thanks to that because people were so bored and lots of people found my account.
A business graduate with a minor in marketing, Daly hopes to not only grow CT Thrifts, but also work on creating her own clothing brand.
“My dream is to have my own clothing brand which I kind of started. I have another account called Preloved club,” Daly said.
“I’ll be saving like blank stuff and I’ve kept huge Ikea bags in my basements with blank stuff so I can start putting my logo on. It’s like a heart that says favorite club while on the back, it’s in big letters that I write “buy sustainably”.
Daly was also nervous about others finding out about her account when she arrived in Springfield, but she is now happy to see people carrying her stuff all over campus.
“I was a little nervous. I remember a girl on my football team made an offer on something and I didn’t really talk. I was so calm last year and I was like, ‘ “I don’t want them to know it’s me,” Daly said. “I remember being so insecure, and now I’m proud of how it turned out. I I’ll be in Cheney and I’ll see somebody wearing something and I’ll be like, ‘Oh my god, that’s from me!’ »
To buy clothes from Daly, her savings instagram is @ctthriftss.
Photo: Hayden Choate/The Student
