Members of the Oxfam retail team are preparing for the grand opening of the charity’s second Oxfam superstore – which is set to welcome the Manchester public for the first time on Friday 19 July.
The new Oxfam superstore is promising to be “a hub of community engagement”, and is located at The Manchester Fort Shopping Park in the Cheetham Hill area of the city. The first store of this nature – a supersized version of a typical Oxfam store – was unveiled in Oxford in September 2019.
At the time of the Oxford opening, then Oxfam GB CEO Danny Sriskandarajah described the space as containing a “huge treasure trove of items” and “a destination shopping experience”.
He called it a “social hub at the heart of the community which we hope will give people a greater sense of the incredible difference they can make by shopping, donating, or volunteering at Oxfam”.
A similar plan is in place for the Manchester Oxfam superstore, with a café installed as well as two storeys covering 10,000 sq ft of preloved clothing, books, electricals, toys, and several other categories.
Green Retail World editor, Ben Sillitoe, spoke at the Charity Retail Association annual conference in Harrogate in June – and he urged charity retailers to talk up their sustainability credentials and to underline their status as what he described as “pre-loved pioneers”.
Wider retail has latched on to the demand for vintage and second-hand goods in recent years by describing their pre-loved offerings as some sort of ‘new’ marketing proposition. But charity retailers have had pre-loved as their proposition since they arrived on the high street at the end of the 19th century, and they don’t always market themselves with this modern parlance.
There has been evidence of it in the build-up to the superstore’s arrival, though. Oxfam retail director Lorna Fallon promoted the Manchester opening on LinkedIn as “two floors full of pre-loved goodness”, and talked about its “circular fashion” offering as a key feature of the retailing space.
[image credit: Green Retail World]
