HOW GEN Z AND MILLENNIALS ARE TURNING CHARITY SHOPS INTO FASHION BOUTIQUES

Charity shop prices are rising in part because of affluent millennial and Gen Z shoppers who pride sustainability over secondhand bargains.

Seen as an “antidote to fast fashion”, many charity shops are benefiting from the growing demand by shunning their old image of a high street jumble sale for something resembling an upmarket boutique.

Jayne Cartwright, director of the Charity Retail Consultancy, which works with charity shops, said people used to be embarrassed about buying secondhand, but this has changed in the last fifteen years.

She said Mary Portas, who opened her first shop in support of Save the Children in 2009, spearheaded a “charity shop revolution” which continues to this day.

The rise of fast fashion has also meant that charity shops aren’t necessarily the place to shop if you want very cheap clothing.

“Lots of people can afford to buy new now because you can go to the likes of Primark or Shein and other online companies and buy fashion garments for a couple of pounds, for the price of a cup of coffee,” Ms Cartwright told i.

“But actually who wants those items? They’re not good for anybody. They’re not good for the people who produce them. They’re not good for the planet. And they’re not good for the customer, because they fall apart immediately.”

Robin Osterley, chief executive of the Charity Retail Association, said charity shops are increasingly attracting more affluent middle classes.

“We’re seeing huge amounts of customers, particularly younger folk and Gen Z coming into our shops,” he told i. “They want to buy secondhand because it’s an antidote to fast fashion.

“They’re fed up with how much we manufacture and the impact it has on the environment and they want to shop more sustainably.”

Charity retailers generally believe they attract four types of customers: those who want to shop sustainably, those looking for craft materials, those fed up with a lack of variety on the high street and those driven by the need for cheaper products.

Mr Osterley said charity shops are seeing the biggest growth in the first three types, especially “sustainability shoppers”.

Ian Matthews, director of retail at Save the Children, said its plans and strategy involve appealing to a growing trend of “ethical shopping”. People are more conscientious about where they’re buying from and their climate footprint, he said.

While Martin Wildsmith, chief commercial officer at Sue Ryder, told i the “overriding motivation” of its shoppers today is a search for something special and unique.

The rise of ‘sophisticated’ pricing

As a result, charity shops are increasingly taking into account their customer base when setting prices.

Mr Osterley said it is common for charity shops to have different prices that depend on how affluent their shoppers are in the local area.

He said shop managers and volunteers who usually live locally tend to “know what their community can put up with in terms of pricing and price accordingly”.

A sweep of charity shops in Kensington, one of London’s most affluent boroughs, revealed items for sale ranged from high-end – Jimmy Choo, Mulberry and Yves Saint Laurent – to high street – M&S, Zara and Uniqlo.

One coat from Maje was on sale at Royal Trinity Hospice shop for £350. An M&S T-shirt was £12, even though similar T-shirts sold new in M&S are £9.50.

Some of the biggest chains have very clear pricing guidelines and tell shops what to charge for a particular type of clothing from a particular brand, Mr Osterley said.

Others opt for something in between: shops are given guidelines but they can tailor prices to their local area.

If a shop receives a particularly valuable item, such as a Versace dress, and it does not sell at a higher price, rather than knock money off, charities will move the item to another location where locals are more affluent to maximise its sale price.

Many shops will also put “special” items, like designer pieces, directly onto eBay instead of trying to sell it in store in order to attract a bigger audience of bidders who will be searching for that label.

Ms Cartwright said pricing “has become more sophisticated”, with price guides typically updated every year. The guides tend to include how many items should go on sale every day and how long they should stay on sale for, which is typically just two weeks.

Charity shops also refresh stock more quickly than many high street retailers, to maintain interest.

“Twenty years ago, lots of charity shops might not have had a price guide, or they would have left it completely to the local shop to decide,” Ms Cartwright said.

The Charity Retail Consultancy also runs training courses for retailers on seasonal fashion trends, such as colours, fabrics and designs, to help them understand what may be popular this season.

“It’s really important that we give the shops teams as much knowledge as they can so they can maximise the revenue they get,” Ms Cartwright said.

Charity shops will use information such as the item’s price when it was sold new and what it is currently going for on eBay, Vinted and Depop to inform their decisions.

At Sue Ryder shops, staff will often photograph items with their smartphones and do a reverse image search to find more information about them online.

A few charity shop chains have online accounts on Vinted, Depop, Vestiaire, Discogs, Facebook Marketplace and other platforms to attract a wider, younger, online audience.

Experts told i that a lot has changed in the last decade from it being down to an individual charity shop worker to price an item – perhaps unaware of a designer’s worth and selling it at the same price point as something from Primark.

Although there are still bargains to be had, prices are rising as a result. For shoppers, there is a trade-off: if you go to an expensive area, shops are more likely to have received higher quality donations, but the items are likely to be more expensive.

Charity shops are ‘not in the business of providing inexpensive clothing’

Like many other small businesses, charity shops have been hit hard by the cost of living crisis, and have raised prices to cover soaring energy bills as well as rising wages.

The average transaction value has risen from £6.65 to £7.02 in the past year – a rise of 5.6 per cent, according to the Charity Retail Association.

Some areas have been more affected by rising costs than others.

However, charity shops have been more protected from inflation than other retailers because they get business rates relief, rely heavily on volunteers and get their stock for free, Mr Osterley said.

When asked if poorer people are getting priced out, Ms Cartwright explained that “charity shops are not a lending library”.

“They are a business and they are there primarily to raise money for charity,” she said. “It’s not to give stuff away.”

Shops that price items too cheaply are not doing their “duty” to the donor and to their parent charity, Mr Osterly added.

“Because the donor expects it and because the charity needs the money, they should price it accordingly. They should price their stuff in a way that they can maximise the value.

“Oxfam is in the business of reducing poverty largely overseas, the British Heart Foundation is in the business of doing medical research, a local hospice is in the business of looking after seriously ill people – they’re not actually, sadly, in the business of providing incredibly inexpensive clothing to people.”

There is another element affecting charity shop price rises – the influence of apps like Vinted and Depop that have allowed anyone to become a secondhand seller.

If charity shops price things too cheaply in stores, Ms Cartwright said they risk being “exploited” by resellers.

“I don’t want people to be going into charity shops and buying something for a pound and selling it for £30 on Vinted, because that’s not fair to the charity and that’s not fair to the donor,” she said. “It’s about reflecting the right sort of price.”

‘We can charge more in Kensington’

At a Royal Trinity Hospice shop, a staff member told i they can charge as much as ten times more for the same item in their location compared with other branches, because locals are wealthier.

They typically use two thirds of the new retail price as a starting point and then rely on experience.

Famous designer brands can be sold for more but designer brands that are equally expensive but unheard of tend to sell for less.

They are picky about the quality of the items they’ll display – donations from cheaper brands, including Zara, are sent off to other locations unless they are particularly “special”.

If something fails to sell she will try lowering the price. Items are on the shop floor for up to four weeks.

When i visited, a Maje coat was on sale £350. (New versions of the brand’s coats were £360 to £479 on the retailer’s website, on sale from full retail prices of up to £629.)

A black Sandro jacket was £46 (the brand’s new jackets are £200+ online), new white Tom Ford jeans were £200. A blue Mulberry jacket was £125, pink crocodile print Jimmy Choo stilettos were £160.

On the cheapest side, there was a new printed relaxed fit M&S T-shirt for £12. (On the M&S website, new printed relaxed T-shirts are £9.50.) A floral print Zara maxi dress was £20. A men’s black long-sleeved Uniqlo dress shirt was £18 (similar items retail for £35 new).

At a nearby Cancer Research shop, a black long-sleeved Sandro dress was £16.50, a black Max Mara coat was £75, men’s Yves Saint Laurent dress shoes were £195, black Ferragamo heels were £50.

The most expensive item in the shop, hung behind the till, was a green knee-length Bottega Veneta jacket for £950.

At an Oxfam store in the area, a worker told i they priced items based on what similar items have been sold for.

Too high and it won’t sell; too low and they will miss an opportunity to raise funds, she said. If they want to sell an item more quickly, they will choose a lower price.

A yellow Kate Spade purse was on sale for £19.99, a black floral long-sleeved Zara dress at £12.99 and a yellow short-sleeved LK Bennett dress at £34.99. A new black PrettyLittleThing jumpsuit was £7.99.

A customer studying the price tag of a grey Sporting Life coat complained: “Missing a button? But it’s £19.99.”

A drop in donations

The Vinted effect means charity shops also need to “make the most” of their donations because people are giving them fewer items, with anecdotal evidence people are saving their best quality clothes to sell themselves.

The prevalence of ultra-cheap fast fashion brands has also made the quality of donations “noticeably lower”, Mr Osterley said.

“People will go into one of these fast fashion outlets or buy them online – Shein is making a nice contribution to this as well – wear something almost as if it was disposable, once or twice, and then pop it into a charity shop,” he said. “We are struggling to sell that for more than 20, 30, 40 pence. And it takes up space and has to be sorted.”

Ms Cartwright said items from cheap online retailers and brands like Primark “can’t really be resold very easily”.

“When they’ve been worn and washed and they’ve lost their shape or they’re just not looking good, then it is hard for charity shops to make money from them and they might have to be ragged,” she said.

Items that fail to sell end up being purchased by clothing collectors, who pay a certain number of pence per kg. They either end up sold overseas in countries like Kenya or, for those that are still too low quality, get “ragged” – turned into other materials such as rags, cloths, tiles and cushion fillers.

To make more of their donations saleable, charity shops are turning to upcycling.

Sue Ryder has a sewing workshop in their Maidstone shop, where volunteers either repair items or turn them into other products such as bag tidies and mops. Volunteers there also repair and repaint furniture.

The retailer is hoping to open a few more of these types of shops this year, Mr Wildsmith said. Sue Ryder also has a bicycle repair workshop in its Luton location and in prisons.

Improved clothing standards ‘needed’

To improve the quality of clothing, the Charity Retail Association has urged the Government to expand its “extended producer responsibility” (EPR) rules.

The policy approach aims to make manufacturers financially responsible for the entire life cycle of products, including their take-back, recycling and disposal.

The objective of these policies is to incentivise manufacturers to reduce the environmental impacts of their goods.

Typically this takes the form of fees that manufacturers pay which are then used to deal with the environmental costs associated with their products.

Some governments have also implemented what’s known as “eco-modulation” – penalising the use of materials that are harder to reuse or recycle and rewarding more sustainable choices by charging different taxes.

In the UK, EPR rules already exist for packaging but their implementation has been delayed until October 2025.

France has an EPR system for textiles and the EU is looking to bring one in over the next few years, Mr Osterley said.

Charity shops also want to see central and local governments implement targets for reusing products rather than just for recycling them.

Until then, charity shops are at the sharp end of a glut of cheap clothes.

“The bottom line is, we need to stop buying those Boohoos and the rest of them because they’re not good for the world,” said Ms Cartwright. “They’re not good at the start nor at the end of their lifespan.”

A spokesman for Primark said: “We don’t believe that price is an indicator of which clothes are going to last longer than others. Research has shown that the durability of both high and low-priced clothing can vary. With the support of our NGO partner WRAP, we’ve introduced our own durability wash framework but we know there is more work to be done.

“Alignment within the industry on a recognised durability measure is needed to allow customers to make more informed choices when shopping for both new and second-hand clothes on the high street.”

A spokesman for Boohoo group said: “We have a proud history of giving back to communities. Through our Be You programme, we work with lots of charities, including helping them to raise money from sample donations. These donations have helped to raise millions of pounds over the years, making a significant contribution to our charitable partners and the vital work they support.”

Shein did not respond to a request for comment.

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