Every fall and spring, the gymnasium at Champaign's Leonhard Recreation Center stops looking like a gym. Racks of tiny winter coats appear where the basketball hoops hang, strollers line up like parked cars, and tables of board books and outgrown toys stretch across the floor. For three days, the building becomes what its organizers call Central Illinois' largest children's consignment sale — a pop-up department store for families, assembled and dismantled in about a week.
The Fall/Winter edition runs Saturday, Sept. 26 through Monday, Sept. 28, 2026. The public shopping hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. each day. Most items are marked half-price on the final day. Admission is free on Sunday and Monday; Saturday's public hours carry a $2 adult admission, though the organizers offer a way to get in free. The weekend opens with two pre-sales on Saturday morning — 8 to 10 a.m. for first-time parents, and 9 to 10 a.m. for educators, both free but requiring registration or proof of school employment. Sunday evening brings a consignor half-price pre-sale from 6:15 to 8 p.m. by pass only.
The event's origin story starts not in Champaign-Urbana but in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Donna Pepper, who was raised in Urbana and graduated from Parkland College and the University of Illinois, found herself living in Tulsa when her husband's job took the family there. Her neighbors insisted she had to attend a local consignment sale. Someone handed her a pre-sale pass; she showed up not knowing children weren't allowed in the shopping area, so her husband ran over from work to watch the kids while she shopped. He happened to know one of the sale's owners through his job, and Pepper and that owner became fast friends.
What struck Pepper was the machinery of the thing. She had a degree in special events, and the process — the tagging, the pre-sales, the volunteer corps, the week-long logistics — set her imagination running. "I was astounded at the entire process," she told Chambanamoms in a 2011 interview. "Having a degree in Special Events, my ideas started flowing and my brain never stopped. I knew Champaign-Urbana needed this so we jumped in."
The jump was a family affair. Pepper's parents fronted the money to start the business, and her mother, who had also worked in special event and meeting planning, became her partner. For years, Pepper, her husband Cam — a former University of Illinois football player — and her parents were the entire setup and teardown crew. Because a sale cycle kept her away from home roughly ten days at a stretch, her father would travel to Tulsa to stay with the couple's son, and later their daughter, earning himself the family nickname "Super Nanny." Volunteers eventually took over the heavy lifting of building and striking the sale floor.
The model has stayed remarkably consistent. Consignors register online, enter descriptions and prices into an inventory system, and drop their items off at an appointed time. One Week Boutique handles the selling. Unsold items can be reclaimed or donated; whatever isn't claimed goes to Crisis Nursery or Salt & Light Ministries, so the merchandise that doesn't sell still finds a home in the community. Shoppers, meanwhile, get the gently used clothing, shoes, toys, books, games, maternity wear, and baby equipment — strollers, cribs, high chairs — plus children's furniture that would otherwise be scattered across garage sales and online buy-and-sell groups.
The scale is the point. The organizers say thousands of shoppers come through the doors over a single sale weekend. That volume is why the event needs a building like Leonhard, and why the venue matters to the story. The recreation center, at 2212 W. Sangamon Avenue in Champaign, brought the park district an indoor walking track, a weight room, a large gym, and an indoor playground. Centennial Park itself dates to 1959, when the land was acquired for about $161,800, and it remains the second-largest park the Champaign Park District operates.
There is a certain symmetry in a sale devoted to second lives — outgrown clothes, outgrown cribs, outgrown everything — taking place inside a park built on land the city bought more than six decades ago. Nothing about One Week Boutique is disposable except the prices. The name is a slight misnomer: the sale itself runs three days, but the operation around it — intake, tagging, setup, selling, teardown, payouts — consumes about a week, which is where the boutique's name comes from.
For parents, the appeal is straightforward arithmetic. A winter coat that retailed for $60 can be had for a fraction of that, and the same coat can be consigned again the following year when it no longer fits. For consignors, it's a way to convert a closet full of outgrown gear into cash without hosting strangers in the driveway or haggling in a Facebook group. For the charities on the receiving end, it's a steady stream of donated goods that might otherwise have gone to a landfill.
And for anyone who simply wants to see what a few thousand families' castoffs look like when they're organized under one roof, the doors at Leonhard are open. Saturday's shoppers pay $2 unless they claim the free-admission offer; Sunday and Monday are free to all. Monday is the day the bargains get sharpest, when most of what remains is marked half-price. The sale runs 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. each of the three days, and by Monday evening the gym goes back to being a gym.