A few people walking through the Shops at Morgan Crossing in South Surrey were startled when the mannequins in one store window moved.
“People were surprised,” said Suzanne Smith, the owner of online fashion boutique BettyBeGood.ca
Smith, a South Surrey resident, and her sister Karianne Hamilton, a resident of Langley, were among the volunteer mannequins who took turns in the window Friday night and Saturday afternoon.
“We wanted to do something a little different,” Smith said.
The store was offering The Salvation Army $1 per minute for every minute the models managed to pose completely still.
The store will donate $120.
Smith said distractions by shoppers outside the window made it difficult for models to hold completely still for more than a few minutes at a time.
The ‘mannequin’ that posed the longest was Vicki Schrader who was able to stand in the window for nearly 90 minutes.
But that was broken up with some breaks and “certainly a shift of pose,” Smith added.
For December, Smith’s web-only store has gone old-school by opening a walk-in outlet called Betty’s Pop Up Shop.
The temporary boutique, located in a former photography studio across from the Winners Store, will be open until Dec. 27.
Smith says dealing directly with living, breathing three-dimensional customers has been “wonderful.”
She may do another temporary store a few months down the road, she said.
The Pop Up Shop is donating five per cent of all purchases to Betty’s Liberty Closet; a fund created by BettyBeGood.ca to help the Salvation Army provide cothing to women fleeing the sex trade.
Betty Be Good was started in November 2011 by Smith.
Its name is a tribute to Smith’s mother.