Department store group says it is responding to customers’ demand for more sustainable shopping
Selfridges is aiming for almost half its interactions with customers to be based on resale, repair, rental or refills by 2030 as the upmarket department store responds to increasing demand for more sustainable shopping.
The retailer said it wanted to step up action after increasing sales of secondhand items by 240% to 17,771 pieces last year and facilitating 28,000 repairs, more than a third of which were pairs of trainers, in its effort to trade in a more environmentally sustainable way. It also rented out more than 2,000 items to customers and sold more than 8,000 refills.
Andrew Keith, the managing director of the department store group, which has four outlets across the UK – in London, Birmingham and two in Manchester – said its “Reselfridges” initiative aimed to change the way that people shop and would form the “backbone of the business”, making up 45% of transactions in future. He set a deadline of 2030 to reach that target.
“We have got to commit to a significant and fundamental shift in the way we do business and use the platform of Selfridges for change,” said Keith.
He said Selfridges’ new owners, the Thai conglomerate Central Group and Austrian real estate company Signa Holding, which finalised the buyout of the group from the Weston family for an estimated £4bn this month, were “very excited” about the green plan and the takeover was an opportunity to accelerate some of its goals with their “support and encouragement”.
He said the first two years of Selfridges’ Project Earth plan had been about experimentation and pilots of ideas, with less than 1% of transactions with shoppers currently based on “circular” models, such as resale or repair.
Resale will become a more integrated part of business, responding to growing interest in secondhand fashion platforms such as Depop in the UK and The RealReal in the US. The secondhand market is expected to grow faster than fast fashion in coming years. In furnishings, Ikea and John Lewis have launched resale and rental services.
Repair services will now be offered outside London and it will be easier to book repairs online. Rental, which Selfridges admits has had fairly limited uptake during the pandemic, will also expand into new categories including kidswear, accessories, fine jewellery and menswear, and refill services will be made more prominently available.
“The important thing is encouraging people to think how they can extend the life of a product,” Keith said. “We are enabling customers to add life into their wardrobes above and beyond buying new.”
Sign up to First Edition
Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you through the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning
This article was amended on 2 September 2022. Circular trade makes up less than 1% of Selfridges’ transactions with shoppers, not 5% to 6% as the company originally stated.
