A summer of stock!
When the national lockdown was announced in March 2020, we had to close all of our charity shops overnight. As people had to stay at home and high street shops were closed, many took the opportunity to declutter and have a sort out. As the weeks went by we received increasing numbers of enquiries asking when we’d be taking donations for our shops again. At that point we had two options; we could do what many other charities did and let people know that we didn’t have the space or resources to manage so many donations, or we could pull out all of the stops, find new space and get extra help. In true St Gemma’s fashion, we decided on the latter!
Our retail team worked together to decide how we could manage collections and donations safely and efficiently. And in anticipation of the retail sector reopening in July, we launched our new online collection service in June. We invited the community to book a slot to have their kind donations of clothing, furniture and bric-a-brac collected from their homes. We also launched a ‘drive & drop’ service encouraging donors to drop off their items at our sorting warehouse in Bramley.
I think it is fair to say that the response from the public was phenomenal! We knew the service would be popular but we didn’t realise quite how many requests we were going to get. Our phones were ringing off the hook as hundreds of generous supporters flooded to donate their preloved items to us. It really was all hands on deck as our fundraising team, who weren’t able to manage any of their usual summer events, pitched in and helped to answer all of the calls and emails that kept flooding in. They quickly worked out systems to arrange home collections, manage the influx of amazing incoming stock and recruit more volunteers to support this mammoth operation. It was a fantastic team effort.
As our warehouse filled to the brim, and demand for collections was still very high, we decided to source some storage units across the city to help manage the stock. One after another will filled those too and eventually ended up with over 20 units full of amazing, high-quality stock. In fact, it has taken a whole team of volunteers nearly two years to sort through all the donations and prepare them for sale.
It is only thanks to your generous donations and an amazing, determined team effort that we successfully and safely managed to reopen all of our shops after that lockdown, and another two lockdowns after that!
This Saturday (12 February 2022) we are absolutely delighted to be opening our brand new charity superstore in Meanwood, opposite Waitrose. It’s our biggest shop yet, over 4,000 sq. ft., and thanks to our amazing community of Leeds, it will be packed full of the most incredible, quality items, many of which were donated back in the very busy summer of 2020.