DEMAND FOR ‘PRELOVED’ Customers shopping at Charity Super.Mkt, a brand which aims to establish shops selling secondhand goods in empty shopping centers and high street spaces, choose clothes to buy as possible Christmas gifts. —Agence France-Presse

LONDON, United Kingdom — Bursting with customers one afternoon the week before Christmas, a secondhand charity shop in London’s Marylebone High Street looked even busier than the upscale retailers surrounding it.

One man grabbed two puzzle sets and a giant plush toy as presents for friends, another picked out a notebook for his wife.

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“Since the end of September, we’ve seen a huge uplift in people coming to our shops and shopping pre-loved,” said Ollie Mead, who oversees the shop displays—currently glittering with Christmas decorations—for Oxfam charity stores around London.

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At the chain of secondhand stores run by the British charity, shoppers can find used, or “preloved,” toys, books, bric-a-brac and clothes for a fraction of the price of new items.

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Popular in Britain for personal shopping, charity stores and online secondhand retailers are seeing an unlikely surge in interest for Christmas gifts, a time of year often criticized for promoting consumerism and generating waste.

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A report last month by secondhand retail platform Vinted and consultants RetailEconomics found UK customers were set to spend £2 billion ($2.5 billion) on secondhand Christmas gifts this year, around 10 percent of the £20 billion Christmas gift market.

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In an Oxfam survey last year, 33 percent were going to buy secondhand gifts for Christmas, up from 25 percent in 2021.

“This shift is evident on Vinted,” said Adam Jay, Vinted’s marketplace CEO.

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“We’ve observed an increase in UK members searching for ‘gift’ between October and December compared to the same period last year.”

According to Mead, who has gifted secondhand items for the last three Christmas seasons, sustainability concerns and cost-of-living pressures are “huge factors.”

‘Another life’

Skimming the racks at the central London store, physician Ed Burdett found a keychain and notebook for his wife.

“We’re saving up at the moment, and she likes to give things another life. So it’ll be the perfect thing for her,” Burdett, 50, told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

“It’s nice to spend less, and to know that it goes to a good place rather than to a high street shop.”

Wayne Hemingway, designer and cofounder of Charity Super.Mkt, a brand which aims to put charity shops in empty shopping centers and high street spaces, has himself given secondhand Christmas gifts for “many, many years.”

“When I first started doing it, it was classed as quirky and weird,” he said, adding it was now going more “mainstream.”

Similarly, when he first started selling secondhand clothes over 40 years ago, “at Christmas your sales always nosedive[d] because everybody wanted new.”

Now, however, “we are seeing an increase at Christmas sales just like a new shop would,” Hemingway said.

“Last weekend, sales were crazy, the shop was mobbed,” he said, adding that all his stores had seen a 20-percent higher than expected rise in sales in the weeks before Christmas.

“Things are changing for the better… It’s gone from secondhand not being what you do at Christmas, to part of what you do.”

Young people are driving the trend by making more conscious fashion choices, and with a commitment to a “circular economy” and to “the idea of giving back [in] a society that is being more generous and fair,” Hemingway said.

‘Sustainable approach’

At the store till, 56-year-old Jennifer Odibo was unconvinced.

Buying herself a striking orange jacket, she said she “loves vintage.”

But for most people, she confessed she would not get a used gift. “Christmas is special, it needs to be something they would cherish, something new,” said Odibo.

“For Christmas, I’ll go and buy something nice, either at Selfridges or Fenwick,” she added, listing two iconic British department stores.

Hemingway conceded some shoppers “feel that people expect something new” at Christmas.

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“We’re on a journey. The world is on a journey, but it’s got a long way to go,” he added.

According to Tetyana Solovey, a sociology researcher at the University of Manchester, “for some people, it could be a bit weird to celebrate [Christmas] with reusing.”

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“But it could be a shift in consciousness if we might be able to celebrate the new year by giving a second life to something,” Solovey told AFP.

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“That could be a very sustainable approach to Christmaswinph, which I think is quite wonderful.” —Agence France-Presse

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