Bursting with customers one afternoon the week before Christmas, a second-hand 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 a present for friends, another picked out a notebook for his wife.
“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.
At the chain of second-hand stores run by the British charity, shoppers can find used, or “pre-loved,” toys, books, bric-a-brac and clothes for a fraction of the price of new items.
Popular in the UK for personal shopping, charity stores and online second-hand retailers are seeing an unlikely surge in interest for Christmas gifts, a time of year often criticized for promoting consumerism and generating waste.
UK customers were set to spend £2 billion (US$2.5 billion) on second-hand Christmas gifts this year, about 10 percent of the £20 billion Christmas gift market, a report last month by second-hand retail platform Vinted and consultants RetailEconomics found.
In an Oxfam survey last year, 33 percent said they were going to buy second-hand gifts for Christmas, up from 25 percent in 2021.
“This shift is evident on Vinted,” Vinted marketplace CEO Adam Jay said. “We’ve observed an increase in UK members searching for ‘gift’ between October and December compared to the same period last year.”
Mead, who has gifted second-hand items for the last three Christmas seasons, said sustainability concerns and cost-of-living pressures are “huge factors.”
Skimming the racks at the central London store, doctor 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, said. “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 co-founder of Charity Super.Mkt, a brand which aims to put charity shops in empty shopping centers and high street spaces, has himself given second-hand Christmas gifts for “many, many years.”
“When I first started doing it, it was classed as quirky and weird,” he said, adding that it was now going more “mainstream.”
Similarly, he said when he first started selling second-hand clothes more than 40 years ago, “at Christmas your sales always nosedive[d], because everybody wanted new.”
However, now “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 second-hand not being what you do at Christmas, to part of what you do,” Hemingway said.
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,” he said.
At the store till, 56-year-old Jennifer Odibo was unconvinced. Buying herself a striking orange jacket, she said she “loves vintage.” However, 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,” Odibo said.
“For Christmas, I’ll go and buy something nice, either at Selfridges or Fenwick,” she said, listing two iconic British department stores.
Hemingway conceded some shoppers “feel that people expect something new” at Christmas.
“We’re on a journey. The world is on a journey, but it’s got a long way to go,” he added.
University of Manchester sociology researcher Tetyana Solovey said “for some people, it could be a bit weird to celebrate it [Christmas] with reusing.”
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