Highlands-based entrepreneur Ashley Mills reached out to feel the soft, pebbled leather of the handbag in front of her. She turned one of the bag’s tassels over in her hands, inspecting the elegant brass hardware.
It’s her favorite out of the dozens of designer bags for sale in her collection. This one’s a Chloe. It has sold out online. Mills has priced it at $1,995.00.
“She’s timeless. She’s classic. You can wear her for 50 years.”
Above the bag is a Chanel. Below it, a Prada.
Mills has always loved purses. She doesn’t know where it came from. Her mom, a postal worker and single mother, didn’t care much for fashion. But as a little girl, Mills remembers folding up paper grocery bags like a formal evening clutch. She loved playing dress-up. She still loves it. “You get to be whoever you want to be,” Mills said.
“I mean, you can be rock and roll. You can be classic Audrey Hepburn,” she added. “You get to be whatever version of yourself you want to be, and I think clothes just do that.”
She might have been channeling Jane Birkin when she spoke with The Smoky Mountain News from her new luxury resale shop in Highlands, The Curated Closet, with her curtain bangs and mod mini dress.
Mills dressed up for the occasion. And while Mills loves designer clothes, she’s anything but prissy. She and her brand manager, Ashley MacKinnon, have been grinding away getting the store ready for their grand opening for weeks.
Mills had been kicking around the idea of opening a boutique for years, but actually jumping on the opportunity to begin her latest venture came to her in an instant one night when she couldn’t sleep. She’d recently attended a class at Highlands Yoga, when she noticed the retail space next door was suddenly empty. The former business had just moved, and the space had not been re-leased yet when Mills’ gears started turning. Shortly after, on the aforementioned sleepless night, she sat down, and the mission statement for a nonprofit connected to the retail store poured out of her. Things fell into place from there.
Mills signed the lease on July 2, and by July 27, she and MacKinnon were popping champagne at the boutique’s soft opening.
The two worked long days to get the shop operational in just a few weeks, painting it green, wallpapering the walls and stocking the store full of racks and racks of high-end clothing.
“My husband says I’m like, ‘ready, shoot, aim,’” Mills said. “I shoot first then aim later, but it’s not impulsive or anything. I’ve always dreamed of this.”
At her shop, Mills bristled at getting her photo taken.
“For the past three weeks, we’ve been in it. Messy buns, no makeup. Today I was like, ‘I have to brush my hair again,’” she said. “Part of the intention behind this is I wanted to force myself to dress up again. I was in corporate, I dressed up, and then I kind of stopped. I lost myself, but I want to feel good when I leave the house again, so that was another part of this whole thing.”
During COVID, when all the big box stores closed, Mills started buying and selling higher-end fashion as a hobby. At her day job, she runs a small empire of Spice & Tea Exchange franchises. She owns one on Main Street in Highlands, one in Dahlonega, Georgia and one in Bozeman, Montana, and has made a success of it in the last 15 years.
When she bought her first franchise, she quit her corporate job and went back to bartending several nights a week to bootstrap herself enough to get the spice store up and running. She turned that business profitable, later purchasing her second franchise. Eventually, she expanded to Bozeman, and now Mills feels like she’s at a comfortable place with the team she’s hired to manage her epicurean babies.
Business is good. It’s stable, and at 40-something, Mills has the itch again to try something new and move into the next phase of her life. With her latest venture, she wants to help boost other women into the next phase of their lives as well with her nonprofit called The Next Chapter Collective. A portion of every purchase at The Curated Closet will go toward the venture, which Mills says will help women move on from difficult chapters in their lives and into bigger and brighter pastures.
Though the organization is in its infancy, The Next Chapter Collective is dedicated to “helping women move through significant life transitions with confidence, empowerment, and support.”
Mills has kept the mission intentionally open to interpretation and wants to help a wide breadth of women — from those who are going through difficult divorce to those who are working their way out of a financial hole to those who are taking a gamble with their life to pursue a new career path. The Next Chapter Collective will give away grants ranging from $500-$2,500 and a new wardrobe, furnished by Mills’s growing collection of stylish garments.
The idea is, if clothes can help you be the person you want to be — and Mills has racks and racks of beautiful clothes — why not help other women dress up as the next version of themselves that they want to be too?
“You put on an outfit, and sometimes it makes you grow two inches because your shoulders sit higher,” Mills said. “And that’s the mission of the boutique. I’m very passionate about giving women their confidence back, whether it’s a new job or if somebody is in remission from an illness.”
Business with a Mission
Mills and her team recently worked with a woman who was recovering from an eating disorder. The woman’s clothes no longer fit, and she didn’t have the money to purchase new ones. Mills encouraged her to visit the shop. She closed The Curated Closet for a private shopping experience, and by the time the woman left, Mills said she was radiating.
It seems like a small thing — a couple new shirts, a few pants, maybe some shoes — but Mills insists the mission is about more than handbags and pretty dresses. Fashion is not some frivolous thing, she says. It’s not everything, but Mills believes in the power of a good outfit to boost a woman’s confidence. And a confidence boost can be a lifeline to a woman who’s at her lowest.
Just ask MacKinnon. A year and a half ago, she lost everything. She was fresh out of an abusive relationship, and her ex drained her bank account and left her with nothing.
She remembers going to countless nonprofits and government agencies looking for help and being turned away many times.
At one particularly awful point, while in full-leg cast, hobbling on crutches just outside of the Social Security office in Franklin, she fell. A woman walked right past her on the ground and into the building.
While going through such a horrible time, MacKinnon said she stopped caring about her appearance. She was just trying to survive. She had a closet full of beautiful clothes but couldn’t bring herself to wear any of them. They reminded her too much of her past.
Slowly, she’s built her life back. She began working again.
Then, in April, MacKinnon interviewed for a position at Mills’ Spice & Tea Exchange store in Highlands, and what would normally have been a 30-minute meeting turned into two hours of chatting, laughing and connecting with one another over their shared interests.
MacKinnon had experience working in consignment shops, and shortly after working at the Spice & Tea Exchange, Mills came to her with the idea of opening the boutique. Since then, the excitement and hard work of opening The Curated Closet have pulled MacKinnon into a new, happier phase of her life she said.
“It brought me back to life,” she said.
On a recent day off, MacKinnon went and got a manicure for the first time in years.
“I washed my hands when she was done, and I looked at my nails, and I thought, ‘I recognize these nails. I recognize these hands.’ And then I raced [back to the shop] and told [Mills] what happened, and I just started crying. I think I’ve found myself.”
Mills had no idea about any of MacKinnon’s past when she hired her, but the two have since become like sisters, bonding over how closely one another aligns with the mission help uplift women.
It’s only been a few weeks, and The Curated Closet has already expanded the store and added extended sizing. On a recent Saturday morning, a steady stream of ladies with tennis skirts and sleek bobs perused the aisles of the store, thrilled with Highlands’ newest shopping destination. One pair of friends took turns in the fitting room trying on dresses and blouses for one another. “What do you think of this one?” one of the women asked.
“Oh, I love that color! I think it’s beautiful on you,” her friend replied.
Mills and MacKinnon flitted around the store, busy offering customers dressing rooms, checking them out, restocking clothing racks. They love it.
Mills stopped to tell a group of women about how the store works and about The Next Chapter Collective, and they talked with one another about how they should bring some of their wardrobe up from Atlanta to consign. Mills wanted the store to feel like someone’s home closet, and the women lounging by the fitting rooms giggled while they tried n new outfits like girls at a sleepover.
Already, Mills’ longtime dream has shown itself to have legs.
Part of her strategy is the location. Since Highlands is a popular resort town for the wealthy, most of her consignment inventory comes to her new with tags. It’s also all high-end brands. The store’s racks are filled with pieces from Anthropologie, FARM Rio, Sanctuary, Nordstrom, Chanel and the like, as well as mid-range brands like Talbots, J. Crew and Banana Republic. Any clothing that is outright donated to the store is sold at lower price points, and 100% of those profits go towards The Next Chapter Collection.
“It’s a pretty affluent town, and people wear things one or two times,” Mills said. “Let’s recycle it. It’s cyclical. Like, let’s get it back out and let somebody else wear that. It’s good for the environment. It’s good for everyone.”
Now, Mills and MacKinnon are thinking about next steps, about how they can help more women.
Mills’s longtime assistant, Karen Hooker, will be moving from St. Petersburg, Florida, to Highlands soon to help grow the new business, and like MacKinnon, Hooker said Mills has played a huge part in helping her grow in her career and as a person.
With this move, Hooker said she’s excited to step into a bigger role within Mills’ businesses.
“She always sees the positive in things, and she’s taught me how to think like that too now,” Hooker said. “We always see the light at the end of the tunnel, and her bringing me onto this is really special because she’s like a big sister in a way. She’s taught me how to think differently and encourage other people.”
It comes naturally to Mills, it seems. She’s an optimist, but not in a sunny, diminutive way. She’s like a dog with a bone. She dropped out of college and never earned a degree. She considers one of the most important moments of her life to be when one of her managers at a restaurant job told her she was too slow. Mills said at first she didn’t believe it, but she sat with that feedback and started nearly running around the restaurant floor to prove to her boss she should keep her job. She hasn’t stopped running since.
“I want everybody to win, and there’s no reason we can’t,” Mills said. “I feel like there’s enough cake for everybody. Let’s win, especially as women. Women are strong and sometimes we feel weak, but we just need that reminder. You’ve got this.”