Northville’s Own 'Cash & Cari' Show Goes Primetime

Northville has made it to primetime, as local businesswoman and TV star Cari Cucksey’s show Cash & Cari will begin its second season next month by switching to 7:30 p.m. Sundays.

After airing at 10 p.m. on Mondays on HGTV in her first season, Cucksey said she’s excited to get her antiques dealing show in front of a bigger audience. The second season starts on July 17.

“Everything is going really good for the show,” said Cucksey, who was traveling Wednesday in New York City to do promotions for her program. “We’re getting great reviews. I’m really excited to have another run.”

Plymouth resident Cucksey and her fiancé Vicenzo Iafano opened , an antique store in downtown Northville, in September last year. She started filming the show for HGTV soon after.

The episodes feature many scenes in the city, and show Cucksey traveling to local estate sales, flea markets, dusty attics and cluttered garages to find hidden or overlooked antique furniture, decorative accessories, collectables and memorabilia.

The second season will be much of the same, but better, she said.

“You’re always able to improve the second year,” Cucksey said. “We’ve got some new crew members, and we’re dealing with some wacky items like suits of armor, cars and musical instruments. We’re doing appraisals, consignments, still digging in barns and basements.”

Her show has tapped into the current reality show craze of antique items, which started with the popular Antiques Roadshow on PBS and expanded into shows like Pawn Stars, a new History Channel staple that details the negotiations at a Las Vegas pawn shop, and A&E’s Storage Wars, where professional scrappers outbid each other to turn abandoned storage container contents into cash.

Cucksey said she’s had almost 400 people ask her how to get started in the business, enough that she has opened a new training program, which will teach folks how to do their own estate sale work. The program is now accessible online through her RePurpose Web site, www.repurposeshop.com, and will later springboard of its own site, she said.

“There’s this rising number of Baby Boomers who are downsizing and getting rid of their stuff, there’s just a lot out there to find,” she said. “A lot of people are interested in doing this themselves.”

And, as previously reported in Northville Patch, the city and Northville Square saw increased foot traffic and out-of-town visitors, sometimes from states such as Ohio and Indiana, while the show aired on TV. Business owners like the 's owner Prudy Vannier said that she has had new customers come in who said they're in town specifically because of the show.

Canton resident Ann Volpe-Kline said she watches the HGTV show with her mother, Ruth Ann Volpe, who also works estate sales.

“It’s something I grew up with,” Volpe-Kline says. “My mom knows how to do all of it, how to price things with the books. She really loves the show.”

While the show is doing well, Cucksey said she’s been a little disappointed with the speed of life in Northville today as it pertains with her store.

“It’s a sleepy town, we need more people to come in,” she said, adding that she can’t rule out moving somewhere else if in the end “it doesn’t make sense financially.”