Cinda Montgomery said she thought it was the cutest compliment when a child met her at church and went home to tell her sister that she’d seen the real, grown-up Cinderella.
The newly married Montgomery is 48, although she looks years younger, and up until now, her life has not been a fairy tale.
Montgomery said she grew up with a hardworking single mother, and when it happened to her, Montgomery had a role model to follow.
Montgomery was 19 when she married the first time and had a daughter, Jordan. By age 21, Montgomery was divorced.
“That’s when I got serious about life,” she said, sitting in her office at Yours Truly Consignment Shop, which she owns. Montgomery’s business is celebrating its 15th anniversary this month.
Montgomery, who grew up in Little Rock with three siblings, said her parents, Judy Rego and the late J.B. Gately, divorced when she was a baby. She was close to her father, who died of lung cancer three years ago.
“My mom is an example of a very strong woman. There was never a day we didn’t know we were loved,” she said.
Although her father supported them as best he could, Montgomery said they were poor.
“We lived in a small, small house,” she said. “People stepped up to help, I remember that. At Christmas, there’d be an envelope on the doorstep with money in it.”
Her mother was a hairdresser and worked two or three extra jobs to make sure her children had what they needed.
“I’m the driven cheerleader captain, president of this, that — driven to do everything,” she said.
It wasn’t a bid for attention, she said, but just using her God-given talents.
“I was a very creative person,” she said.
Montgomery recalled with a laugh how her mother used to admonish her to finish one project instead of undertaking 10 at once. Montgomery’s teachers saw how ambitious and positive she was, and she said they guessed she might be in public relations someday.
Her multiple talents made it hard to hone in on a career.
When she graduated from Little Rock Mills High School, she went to the University of Arkansas at Little Rock — the first in her family to go to college — but she found out it wasn’t for her.
“I wasn’t prepared,” she said.
She landed a job in the accounting department at Arkansas Children’s Hospital, but she started volunteering to paint murals.
“They created a position for me — I was called an imagineer,” she said. Children would gather to watch her paint, and it was seeing them smile that made Montgomery happy. She also helped pick out interior colors for the hospital and helped design logos.
“I could produce, just like I do here,” she said. “I can think fast and problem-solve.”
When her older daughter was 4, Montgomery remarried, to an engineer, and they moved to Conway from Little Rock.
“I never had the desire to own my own business; he did,” she said. They bought a frame shop, which she operated for a couple of years. They sold the business, and she quit work to stay home full time when their son Logan was 2, and they moved to Russellville. Their daughter, Makenzie, was born just before the move.
“Being a stay-at-home mom, I was a bargain hunter,” she said.
Montgomery scoured flea markets, consignment shops and Goodwill stores to find the best items at the best prices. The couple decided to open a consignment store in Conway.
“This is something I could do,” she said. “I was very organized. … I could think fast on my feet.”
Even though she doesn’t have a college degree, Montgomery said she has always had common sense.
“We started it from scratch,” she said. The name came from her now 29-year-old daughter Jordan, who was 13 at the time. “She’s creative, too,” Montgomery said.
“I was ironing one day, and we were just running through names,” Montgomery said. Her daughter pointed out that the clothes were “really theirs,” the consignors, “not ours.”
Yours Truly was born, but it needed a home.
Conway businessman George Covington Sr. had purchased an old boat factory in downtown Conway and was remodeling it. The store’s first unit in the shopping center was 7,500 square feet. “I remember thinking, “How will we ever fill it?” she said. With adult and children’s clothing, the shop was full in six months, and they kept expanding.
They created a separate store for kids’ clothing, then added a second children’s-clothing location.
“I told God I was not scared to work hard, and he tested me,” she said.
For a year, Montgomery and her family lived in the back of the main store in a small apartment her husband built to prove to the bank the business was successful, so they could get a loan. The sale of their home in Russellville had fallen through.
“It was crazy. My kids would ride their scooters in here. The Christmas tree was on the sales floor,” she said. The family reminisces often about those days, she said, like the time a bat got in the building. “It’s a fun memory,” she said.
“We shared a kitchen with employees,” she said. The family had to walk across the street to their children’s store to take a shower, and sometimes Montgomery said she’d walk there in her pajamas because she was so exhausted from working long hours.
Montgomery and her then-husband sold the children’s part of the business to open Aaron Breck in Conway, a designer showroom that sold new merchandise from a variety of stores.
“It filled up quickly. The mistake we made was the outdoor mall had started,” she said, referring to Conway Commons. “It was a beautiful concept, if we could have come in at a different time.”
When Montgomery and her second husband were in the process of divorcing, she decided to go to nursing school.
“I wanted to make a difference in the lives of others,” she said. First, she went to massage-therapy school for nine months to see if she could handle the anatomy lessons. She did it for the education, she said, not with the goal to become a massage therapist.
“I loved it,” she said. “I finished [massage-therapy school] one day and started school for nursing the next,” she said.
Montgomery attended the University of Arkansas Community College at Morrilton, but after two years, family responsibilities caused her to pull out. A year later, she returned, only to stop again when she was needed at home.
“I guess it wasn’t meant to be,” she said.
Montgomery said she got Yours Truly in the divorce, and she started running it full time. Today, her title is general manager.
“I had never written the checks; I had never done the banking,” she said. Montgomery said she relied on assistance from Joel Hawkins of Conway, a certified public accountant, whom she calls “an angel.”
“I learned as I went. It was either sink or swim, and giving up was not an option,” she said. Her faith, as well as her dogged determination and eternal optimism, has kept her going. “I’m an encourager,” she said.
Montgomery keeps a Bible at hand and has Scriptures and quotes on her bulletin board. Each day, she puts a quote on her iPhone calendar. Examples run the gamut from “You must always go beyond what is required” to the more lighthearted “I never make the same mistake twice. I make it five or six times, just to be sure.”
She said that looking back on her life, there was a reason for everything that happened to her.
“This is more my calling and where the Lord’s placed me,” she said. “This business has been a real faith-builder.”
Montgomery said she is “a magnet for the underdog” and has a special place in her heart for single mothers. She said she knows her business helps them.
“This has truly been an investment in a lot of people’s lives,” she said.
All three of her children have worked in the store at some point, and she has 25 employees.
She married Greg Montgomery in July, after dating him for 6 1/2 years, she said. They don’t have children at home, but they have five dogs.
“We don’t vacation because we have dogs,” she said, ticking off the list of expenses. They’re worth it, she said.
Montgomery said juggling employees’ schedules, payroll and making sure 15,000 pieces, on average, of clothing each month are tagged is a “delicate balance.”
That’s what she’s done all her life, though — juggled and balanced and kept going forward.
Another quote came to her mind, and she looked through her phone to read it. She said she’d heard it in a recent football movie.
“It’s not about doing this perfectly,” she said, paraphrasing it. “We mess up, we have to adjust, but we’re giving our best effort.”
Her mantra is to work hard and be nice, she said.
Montgomery said sometimes people will say to her, “I’ll bet you have an easy life.” She said that always surprises her.
“I have walked through struggles. I haven’t had an easy life; I’ve just kept going. I love my kids; I married my best friend,” she said.
It sounds like a perfect Disney ending.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.