WAREHOUSE
VISIT
Traid is a clothing charity selling second hand clothes and aiming to improve poverty and the lives of garment workers lives in the fashion industry. There main objective is to stop clothes being thrown away, and instead turning them into funds and resources to reduce the environmental and social impacts of fast fashion.
As part of the research, we also visited the Traid Warehouse to watch the process of selection from donation to store.
The clothes are brought in by a collection van who goes to the banks and empties them. There are around 1,500 charity Traid banks around the UK. They also do home collections, in total diverting around 3,000 tonnes of clothes from being put into landfill every year.
They then come into the factory, and are sorted on a conveyor belt system.
Two men at the start remove everything that’s not clothing items. It’s surprising what some people dump into the banks, everything from kitchen knives and toasters to children’s toys and a lot of rubbish. This is removed at the start and the belt continues. There is then a team of four who sort through the clothing into what they want and what can be used. The process is quick and always moving so the staff working on the belt have to have a good eye to spot the pieces they want. Around 11,000 items per week are sorted, hung, tagged and priced to reuse and resell. Clothes were then sorted into categories by the workers at the Warehouse to sort the style of the clothing and the condition of it. This helps them to decide if the clothing can be used (so if its clean with no holes or faults) and decide what store it will go into.
Categories include; reject, basic, high street and premium. When we spoke to the lady who worked at Traid, she said often they have store managers come in themselves and handpick certain items for certain stores. Stores placed in higher class areas often get sent the vintage designer clothing (premium) and those in a lower class get sent more affordable basics. Anything with any faults going into reject straight away, anything ex-high street or good quality goes into High-Street, anything branded or vintage would be premium and anything plain and made of a thinner or cheaper fabric would be basics.
Quality is defined as ‘the standard of something as measured against other things of a similar kind’. But for Traid, all clothes are quality as long as they are not a fault product and get rejected.