Sold! The mother of three has an eye for the “Palm Beach chic” furniture styles that her Instagram followers love to buy
Customers can purchase furniture by commenting “Sold” on One of a Find’s Instagram page and choose to pay an additional fee to have their pieces lacquered.
Courtney Bukowsky (pictured inset above) didn’t plan to start a business. The esthetician and mother of three never expected that her hobby of selling furniture through “Charleston Mom Swap” groups would lead her to start an Instagram account, rent a warehouse, or be featured on the PBS series Start Up. Now, after steadily and thoughtfully scaling up, she is ready to think bigger.
At first, Bukowsky just wanted to replace the living room furniture she had purchased in 2002 soon after getting married. She found she could sell her pieces on Facebook and make enough money to redecorate her home. “I could literally change the entire living room but not spend a dollar,” she says.
Encouraged by her success, Bukowsky began posting vintage furniture finds to Instagram to sell rather than keep. After she gained thousands of followers with her ”Palm Beach chic” aesthetic, she started to see the potential and officially launched One of a Find Charleston in 2016, buying and selling vintage and new furniture. “I didn’t realize I had started a business,” she laughs.
A self-proclaimed “She-E-O,” Bukowsky is responsible for every aspect of her venture from shopping, prepping, and posting to packaging and invoicing. She personally inspects each item before staging it at her James Island warehouse and posting it to sell on Instagram. In addition, Bukowsky offers custom lacquer finishes, done by a small team of employees at her John’s Island studio.
Recently, her Insta account featured a cream Dixie campaign chest with brass hardware for $685 and a Brighton-style rattan chair for $225. On One of a Find’s website, she also sells home accessories such as picture frames and trays with bamboo and rattan accents, retaining her signature aesthetic. Bukowsky posts three to four items a day and estimates she has sold about 10,000 pieces.
As she prepares to step back from her career in esthetics to focus on her growing business, Bukowsky eventually plans to centralize all of One of a Find’s services into one showroom and add her own accessories line. At the heart of it all, she maintains that she is “a mom who found a really fun hobby that she enjoyed.”
(Left) After inadvertently starting One of a Find, Courtney Bukowsky began offering custom lacquer finishes to give used pieces new color and shine; (Right) One of a Find has recently hired a few employees to lacquer furniture.
Growing Start-up
Watch the One of a Find episode on PBS's Start-Up here
