Mary Portas to open Save the Children shop in Edinburgh
Howard Lake | 2 November 2009 | News
TV retail advisor and Save the Children Ambassador Mary Portas is opening a boutique style charity shop for Save the Children in Stockbridge, Edinburgh.
“Mary’s Living and Giving Shop for Save the Children” will open on 21 November to take advantage of the pre-Christmas season, and, housed in a former HBOS Bank building, will sell a range of designer clothes at bargain prices.
Portas worked with Save the Children earlier this year when she overhauled their shop in Orpington, Kent as part of a three-part TV series, ‘Mary Queen of Charity Shops’.
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The programme culminated in a designer ‘pop-up charity shop’ in Westfield Shopping Centre in London, which, with the help of Grazia magazine, raised a £109,000 for the charity in just three weeks.
Some of the stock in the Stockbridge boutique has been donated by celebrities such as Jamie Oliver, Peaches Geldof and Lauren Lavern. Grazia magazine will be topping up the rails with designers items.
Mary Portas said: “This is a shop for everyone and we want it to be a place that will inspire Edinburgh to give. The designer bargains in our charity shop will be fantastic and the store has the potential to attract people from across the whole of Scotland. We want to create a real buzz around second hand shopping and make the old fashioned charity shop a thing of the past”.
This will be Portas’ first permanent charity shop, and she has four more in the pipeline across the UK. Her retail strategy agency Yellowdoor will be responsible for the shop refit.
Save the Children will encourage Edinburgh businesses to hold a Donate Don’t Dump Day – or ‘D-Day’, where staff can bring unwanted clothes to work and Save the Children will come and pick them up.
- Charity Retail Association rejects Mary Portas’ view on charity shop numbers (26 October 2011)
- ‘Mary, Queen of Charity Shops’ airs tomorrow (1 June 2009)
- Mary Portas to open 15th Living and Giving Shop for Save the Children (2 September 2014)
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.