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Agence France-Presse

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 soft 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 preloved,” says Ollie Mead, who oversees the shop displays for Oxfam charity stores around London.
At the chain of second-hand 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.

Popular in Britain 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 criticised for promoting consumerism and generating waste.
A report last month by second-hand retail platform Vinted and consultants RetailEconomics found UK customers were set to spend £2 billion (US$2.5 billion) on second-hand Christmas gifts this year, around 10 per cent of the £20 billion Christmas gift market.
In an Oxfam survey last year, 33 per cent were going to buy second-hand gifts for Christmas, up from 25 per cent in 2021.
“This shift is evident on Vinted,” Adam Jay, Vinted’s marketplace chief executive, says.
“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 second-hand items for the last three Christmas seasons, 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, says.
“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 centres 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 says, adding it was now going more “mainstream”.
Similarly, when he first started selling second-hand 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 says.

All his stores have seen a rise in sales 20 per cent higher than expected 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.”
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 says.
At the store till, 56-year-old Jennifer Odibo is unconvinced.
Buying herself a striking orange jacket, she says 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,” says Odibo.
“For Christmas, I’ll go and buy something nice, either at Selfridges or Fenwick,” she added, listing two iconic British department stores.

Hemingway concedes 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 adds.
According to Tetyana Solovey, a sociology researcher at the University of Manchester in England, “for some people, it could be a bit weird to celebrate it [Christmas] with reusing”.
“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 says.
“That could be a very sustainable approach to Christmas, which I think is quite wonderful.”


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This Christmas, a time of year often criticised for promoting consumerism, more Britons than ever before are buying ‘preloved’ gifts


This Christmas, a time of year often criticised for promoting consumerism, more Britons than ever before are buying ‘preloved’ gifts.


Are second-hand Christmas presents the new trend? UK charity shops have a pre-holiday boom

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}This Christmas, a time of year often criticised for promoting consumerism, more Britons than ever before are buying ‘preloved’ gifts

This Christmas, a time of year often criticised for promoting consumerism, more Britons than ever before are buying ‘preloved’ gifts