A newly opened upscale children’s boutique on the Upper West Side says it will donate all its profits to the Children’s Aid Society and is putting some of the young people to work in the store.

Yesterday, two teenagers dressed in bright blue aprons stood in the cheerfully lit children’s clothing and toy store on Amsterdam Avenue, signing for package deliveries, stocking shelves, packaging merchandise, and waiting on the few customers that wheeled strollers into the boutique to browse.

A Time For Children, which philanthropists Marjorie and Michael Stern opened about six weeks ago, from the outside looks like any other charming, expensive Manhattan boutique. But the fleece pullovers and hardcover picture books that hang in the window are a front, of sorts, for a social experiment occurring inside.

The store, sandwiched between a paint-your-own pottery studio and a large toy store, West Side Kids, between 84th and 85th Streets, is donating 100% of its profits to the Children’s Aid Society, a children’s service provider. The store is also staffed by 14 teens from Children’s Aid Society centers who work in pairs with a supervisor to learn retail skills.

“We’re feeling our way here as we’re going along,” Ms. Stern said. “It’s the very beginning of the program, I don’t know where it’s going to end.”

The Sterns, who sold their fragrance company to Avon in the late 1980s for a reported $160 million, are supporting the small boutique through their Big Wood Foundation. The publicity firm Rubenstein Communications is planning a high-profile store launch in October, but the shop is already featured on the Children’s Aid Society Web site. An article on the site says the use of the store “as a laboratory for teen training” makes the shop “quite a different place than any other retail operation in the city.”

“We’re constantly looking to find ways to have corporations help,” the chief executive officer of the Children’s Aid Society, C. Warren Moses, said. He said it was far too early to tell how much money the store would bring to the organization.

While many New York stores give a portion of their proceeds to charity, A Time for Children is relatively unique in taking in no profit at all, the editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Stacy Palmer, said. The Sterns are joining the slim ranks of philanthropists such as Paul Newman, who donates all of the proceeds from his Newman’s Own line of salad dressings and pasta sauces to charity.

“Charities often open businesses to give people skills in the food service industry, or in retail, but it’s unusual to have the donor running the business,” Ms. Palmer said. “A lot of charities are operating their own businesses, and a lot of businesses are thinking about being socially responsible and contributing a portion of their profits.”

A growing trend among charities over the past decade is to run businesses such as specialty restaurants, retail stores, or doggie day care centers to generate more revenue, Ms. Palmer said. A recent report by the Seedco Policy Center in New York, however, shows that few of these ventures ever turn more than a modest profit. “Traditional charity is not enough,” Ms. Palmer said. “The capital has to come from someplace. This kind of store model might be a more successful way.”