It’s not every week we stage a national media event in our shop! This week saw us host the launch gigs for Oxjam 2010, a festival that runs all over the country with promoters and performers donating their time to help raise money for Oxfam. It’s a pretty simple idea that achieves great things.
The very first Oxjam was launched in our shop back in 2007, but that was a very different affair – it was not long after the shop had opened as a bookshop (the old shop was still open up the road) and the gigs were held downstairs. This time, when Tim from the Oxjam launch team approached us, we knew it would be a massive challenge. Find out how we managed after the jump…
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Following on from our Gosh Darnit unwanted-stock-becomes-new-stock window display, I’ve been thinking about the donation process and what role our shop plays in our local community’s experiences with materialism & waste.
(Warning: this is bound to get a bit long/rambling and maybe even a bit controversial, so apologies in advance. Oh and, obviously, anything I say here is not the view of Oxfam but rather my own!)
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Saturday saw the amazing Nat and Laura from Gosh Darnit install a new window display in the shop. To quote their manifesto: “Gosh Darnit is a newly formed collection of craft loving simpletons. With a puncheon for pompoms and an adortion of all that be vintage; we spend most of our time hunting out shabby old knick knacks to turn into… slightly less shabby new knick knacks.”
Nat and Laura spent a bit of time going through our bins, for stuff that was either broken or dirty or otherwise unwanted — they then took this home and with the help of some of their talented friends they made a bunch of awesome new stock for us. The outcome of this is what you can see currently filling our window.
More photos after the jump…
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The latest in our window displays is Andy’s Notting Hill-inspired Carnival selection — perfect place to get your clobber before heading over to West London tomorrow and Monday. We’ve also been saving up some awesome records to go in the display, but I think most of these were sold as soon as they were put in, earlier in the week!
(In case you’re wondering, we won’t be open on Bank Holiday Monday!)
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After a few weeks of some guest window displays, it’s nice to dive into the window and get your hands dirty. I did one a couple of weeks ago with the book/library theme, and after taking out our Lulu and Lush display, Steve spent most of yesterday assembling this excellent monster…
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Today saw this excellent window display go in from the girls at Fairy GothMother by Lulu and Lush — Zara got in touch with us after seeing our Harrods and Swell Vintage installations, wanting to try her hand at it!
More pictures and more info after the break!
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The onset of summer means a heap of changes in our shop!
We’ve got a couple of volunteers who’ve been on internships and placements leaving — we’ll be sad to see them go! There’s also a whole raft of regulars who can’t come in during the holidays as they have to look after their pesky kids.
All of which adds up to: volunteer drive!
Do you have a spare morning/afternoon during the week? Or do you fancy coming in for a few hours on Saturdays? Come in and have a chat with us, email us on oxfamshopf8084 AT oxfam DOT org DOT uk, or, if you’re really keen, fill in this form and bring it in to the shop.
Volunteering at our shop is fun. Fact. We have a great team, with anywhere between 5 and 15 people in the shop at any one time. We serve a couple of thousand people a week, and there’s probably about five times that amount actually come into the shop. We have free tea and (when I remember to buy them) biscuits. We even have a shop rounders team.
We have several roles that you could perform in the shop. This ranges from working on the till to tidying the shop floor to sorting stock to alphabetising our books (some people enjoy this; not just me). Or you could be one of those magic volunteers who wants to do a bit of everything, in which case I love you.
That’s my pitch. What’ve you got?
We got a really excellent donation of vintage stock today from an ex-seller, and we’re pretty excited about it! It’s going to be sorted and priced tomorrow morning (19/6) and will be out in the afternoon. This is just a really small selection of what we were given; there are some excellent leather and denim jackets, and a whole bunch of awesome jumpers and dresses.
There are more pictures after the jump — we feel sure that this stock will move quickly, so tell your friends and come down tomorrow!
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This is picture of our ‘Art’ bookshelf late yesterday afternoon. For those of us who work with books in the shop (and probably customers too!) this section is usually disappointing. The section is usually pretty threadbare because we can sell most of the art books that we get for more than 99p (i.e. our standard price for books). This means that the higher-priced books go into our window displays or behind the till.
We’re obviously really pleased that our donors give us such nice books that we’re more or less forced to charge a higher price for them, but at the same time it’d be nice to be able to have a few books in the 99p section just to give the shelves a bit of consistency.
However! It is not always bare. We got a really high-quality donation of books yesterday afternoon. There were some brilliant books among this donation, including Russian folk art titles and Victorian flower albums that go straight into the higher-price category. However, there was also a bunch of interesting but not particularly rare/valuable art books, some of which can be seen on the shelf above. Some nice little fashion/architecture/history of art titles, all ready to be snapped up at 99p.
They’ll probably all be gone by the end of Monday, but I just wanted to put on record that we do sometimes have a substantial offer of 99p art books!
(As a final note on art books — people sometimes ask about what we put online. One recent example is this book on John Galliano — we sold it for £55 on Amazon marketplace last week. It doesn’t seem likely (though not impossible) that this book would’ve sold for this price in the shop, but it just seems more efficient to sell something like this where the buyers who are looking for it can find it, and pay the price that it’s worth that will raise Oxfam the most money for our work. This is a bit of a controversial move for charity shops, we’re well aware, but we feel we have a duty to our donors to get the best price for goods that they give us!)
Sorry for the bad pun! Nia and Rachel, two talented girls from Harrods’s visual merchandising dept, have been working on a window display for us. We’re really chuffed with it — they donated some full-size mannequins to us that will come in really handy, and used some of our stock to create a windswept-travel theme that is sure to baffle/impress our customers and Dalston residents over the coming week. As we were setting up the display and checking it from the outside, one local punter said he thought he was having hallucinations, as “that’s not Oxfam!” — he was right, in one sense, but we’re really keen on getting people to come in and use our stock to make something different. We’ve got Frankie from Swell Vintage at the end of the month, and “in negotiations with” local band T3ETH about something further down the line. The display after the current one is going to be a Glastonbury-themed camping/festival window, so if you’re looking for any essential outdoorsy summer supplies, stay tuned!
Click the picture below for a full-size view.
Making-of pictures after the jump!
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