Victoria Ford – credit Derian House Childrens Hospice
An English thrift shop that found itself buried under mountains of old donated clothes has gotten a helping hand from a talented designer.
Recent fashion and design graduate Victoria Ford approached the shop and offered to transform some of its unwanted rags into bespoke pieces for sale at premium prices.
The thrift shop proceeds benefit Derian House Children’s Hospice in Chorley, but rather than generating revenue to pay for the hospital’s expenses, the shop had mostly become a dropping off point for unwanted clothes which piled up in “eyewatering amounts” and sat unsorted in huge sacks in the shop’s warehouse.
Most would have probably ended up in a landfill if it weren’t for Ford’s belief in second-chance fashion and an eye for quality.
“Rather than letting things go to waste, I wanted to help Derian House to give their unsellable clothing a new life, and to turn them into something others can enjoy,” Ford told the BBC.
Mick Croskery from the Derian House shop said Victoria’s collection was attracting a new crowd to the shop.
Victoria’s collection – credit Derien House Childrens Hospice
Running on “super tight margins” and “inundated with rags” too worn down, or with holes, stains, or burns, to sell on, Croskery said “it is that kind of stuff that Victoria has repurposed for us that we couldn’t sell.”
They used to pay 70 cents per bag of donated clothes, but the shop was receiving so many “rags” that they eventually lowered that all the way to 15 cents.
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Ford has had to get creative to make use of the excess, but she’s been doing just that since she was 10, she said, finding items in similar thrift shops and transforming them with her sewing machine as a child. She’s redesigned dozens of items, and even made a handbag out of an inflatable mattress.
Derian House Children’s Hospice cares for more than 400 babies and toddlers, children, young people and their families, and costs more than £6 million, or about $7.8 million to run annually.
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