Charity Shop Challenge
Uniting a cross-disciplinary creative team of designers and educators with Ireland's leading charity retailers, national reuse organisations and governmental circular and environmental experts
Overview
Project duration: Ongoing
Partners: NCAD, Oxfam Ireland, NCBI, Cancer Society Ireland, The Rediscovery Centre (RDC), The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Community Reuse Network Ireland (CRNI), Charity Retail Ireland (CRI), Professor Becky Earley
Challenge
Lifetime extension is one of the most effective ways to reduce the impact of the clothing industry. The latest research shows that to achieve the 1.5-degree pathway, 1/5 five garments need to be traded through circular business models by 2030. For Ireland to reach its climate goals, it is essential to increase local clothing reuse.
Charity shops play a vital role in empowering citizens to ‘go circular’. However, they are under pressure due to various external factors, such as the decline of the highstreet, the ‘drop, don’t shop’ phenomena, increased competition from brand-led resale and decreasing product quality.
Process
To address these challenges, a cross-disciplinary creative team of designers & educators will together with Ireland’s leading charity retailers, national reuse organisations and governmental circular and environmental experts to creatively redesign the charity shop model toward the overall aim of encouraging and enabling Irish citizens to rethink their lifestyles and choose secondhand clothing, first.
We will achieve this through 1) field research 2) participatory co-design workshops 3) community engagement through innovative retail pilots and corresponding public-awareness campaigns.
- In order to understand each charity shop’s operations, challenges, current and aspirational customers, NCAD will map the ‘current state’ in charity retail, through a combination of desk and onsite field research, using methods including key informant interviews and direct and participant observation techniques.
- NCAD will design and execute a series of co-design workshops with the 4 core charity shops and creative team to ideate, design and prototype various innovative pilot interventions with the potential to increase secondhand consumption. This could include innovations in in-store experience, collection methods, B2C communication or alternative business models.
- Charity Partner will launch innovative pilots and a creative public awareness campaign. NCAD will translate key learnings into a charity retail toolkit and train-the-trainer programme.