The St Vincent de Paul Society Victoria has launched a new online Vinnies store it describes as the “shop that never sleeps”. Source: The Guardian.
A warehouse in Melbourne’s industrial south-east is filled to the brim with goods Vinnies Victoria is preparing to sell in its new online store. Workers meticulously sort through items before they’re photographed, uploaded to the cloud and put on the website for sale.
“Our customers have been asking for this for a while,” Vinnies’ Liz Randle said. “So we thought, right, let’s go, let’s get serious about this.”
Over the past 10 years, op shops around Australia have changed. No longer are they small stores where bargain hunters find $1 bins; now they’re often stylish, with a high level of visual merchandising. And increasingly, they’re moving online.
Salvos has had an online store for five years, while Vinnies Victoria launched theirs in November and Vinnies NSW are about to establish an online fashion store.
From clothing to electricals, the online store sells an eccentric array of items – Ms Randle said one benefit is finding a market for items they couldn’t put in stores.
“The other day, and I’m not even joking, [someone] donated a caravan,” she said. “We sold that in 48 hours.”
A hospital bed worth $7000, an Olympic-level training bike for paraplegics – they’ve gone up online and out the warehouse door at a discounted price.
Ms Randle said online won’t replace the brick-and-mortar stores. Vinnies has 121 stores nationwide and has opened 11 in the past six months.
Last year they sold four million items – up from 1 million the year before.
“Driving that is a huge shift in the market around sustainability and ‘buy nothing new’ trends, with the younger generation really bringing that to the fore,” she said.
“But we’re seeing an increase in working poor over the past five years. You’ve got families out there where mum and dad are both working [and] it’s still a struggle.”
FULL STORY
A Vinnies that never sleeps and an online thrift store to rival Asos: op shops log on to meet new demand (By Cait Kelly, The Guardian)
