Ballymena Age NI links with online retailer

Charity Age Concern now has a new way to offer donated branded and premium quality pre-loved clothing and accessories to a wider range of consumers by selling them online via haru.co.uk.

Local e-commerce start-up Haru (Help and Re-Use) is a new way for charities to offer their quality pre-loved clothing to a wider range of consumers by selling them online across various marketplaces including haru.co.uk.

Through Haru, donated premium clothing can now be sold to a potentially global online consumer. Donors can be safe in the knowledge that their donated high quality items will now fetch a fairer price and therefore make a bigger contribution to the charity.

By making the second-hand clothing market more accessible online, Haru aims to tackle fast fashion and make it more sustainable by reducing the industry’s associated waste and carbon emissions, whilst also supporting the all-important charity shop market.

Explaining how it works, Sam Lynas, Co-Founder of Haru said, “Haru was designed to make online selling easy and accessible for charity shops and sustainable brands. Haru guides retailers on what items to sell online and collects their stock, which is then processed and sold, with money going back to the original organisation.

“Our goal is to see charity shops increase their fundraising by expanding their pre-loved marketplace, through enabling them to sell online. Never has Age NI’s work been so important and we want to play a small part in supporting the work they do, while empowering people to do the same through their purchases.”

Sinead McGrath of Age NI said: “This is fulfilling such an important gap in the charity shop space. Haru aims to get charities a higher price for premium items than they might achieve on the shop floor. This in turn should encourage people to donate their more precious pre-loved clothing and accessories. Many people who donate to charity shops like ours fear that their higher end or branded items won’t achieve their real market value. Quite often, these items either sell for a bargain price or, more often, people just don’t donate them for resale and hang on to items they no longer use.

“This is a simple but brilliantly executed idea: the Haru marketplace looks great, it’s easy to navigate and there is an ever-changing store stocked with fabulous branded items. There will be lots of very happy shoppers once they discover Haru!”

Haru’s founders are also driven by the desire to tackle fast-fashion by reducing the amount of clothing going to landfill and aiming to make fashion more sustainable.

Visit Haru online at www.haru.co.uk or shop Age NI’s collection at www.haru.co.uk/ageni.

If you have branded or sought-after premium items to donate to Age NI and sold via Haru, these can be dropped off at any of Age NI’s shops including Ballymena.