Click Collection now offers charities around £5 per bag of donated clothes
Howard Lake | 16 April 2015 | News
Working with Clothes Collectors, multi-charity online clothes shop Click Collection says that it has increased the value of the typical bag of donated clothing to a charity to around £5 per bag. This contrasts with less than £1 per bag that it says that most charities achieve from a door-to-door clothes collection.
Indeed, charities can generate additional income from donated items when the best items are resold through the Click Collection shop on eBay for Charity.
The partnership with Clothes Collectors, run by existing partner LMB Textile Recycling, has helped boost productivity and enabled more charities to join. It means that the operation is now divided into wholesale and retail sales. Clothese Collectors takes on responsibility for the collections, sorting and wholesale sales. They pay charities up to £300/tonne.
Click Collection now is focused on the retail sales, using their expertise to list the best donated items in their international eBay for Charity shop. Charities receive a percentage donation as their items sell.
Click Collection founder David Alder says that charities “incur no costs whatever”, and it takes just a few hours for a charity to join the system. Once they have joined, they can encourage their supporters to go to the clothescollectors.org website to start the process.
How much does your charity raise per bag of donated clothing?
How does it work?
The charity asks supporters throughout the UK to donate clothes by going to the Clothes Collectors website. This is where they order free bags, if needed. These are posted out by Clothes Collectors together with a barcode label that identifies the donor and the charity.
The supporter fills the bag and takes it to one of over 5,500 conveniently located Collect+ Drop-Points around the UK. Bags are sent (free of charge to the donor) to the Clothes Collectors factory in London. The clothes are sorted, and items suitable for resale are taken out and sent to Click Collection. The charity is paid by Clothes Collectors for the tonnage collected.
Click Collection checks the selected clothes again and puts them through the process of steaming, photographing each item individually, listing the details for the shop, and uploading the information to eBay. Clothes are then held in hanging storage awaiting sale. When sold they are promptly picked, packed and dispatched to the customer by Click Collection.
Nearly £10 per bag for charities in 2014
Of course, the income per donated bag of clothes depends on the weight, quality and number of items suitable for resale. Last year was particularly successful, with almost £10 per bag being generated for participating charities. However, £5 per bag is a more realistic result.
Photo: coat hanger by Picsfive on Shutterstock.com
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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.