nd Jaggad activewear.  Charlene Perera, who until recently headed up the Australian operations of Hush Puppies, is spearheading the operations of the project, alongside retail adviser and former Tom’s ANZ manager John Elliott.  “[John] came up with the vision. He’s worked with Charitable Recycling Australia for a while now, and has aligned with [a number of our charity partners] for a while now,” Perera told Inside Retail.  “We’ve talked a lot about the fact that with everything that’s happening in the sustainability and reuse space, these charities have such a huge opportunity to think about how they can do charity retail differently.” And Perera says that’s the mission. By offering a more selective number of products, Charity Shop? hopes to bring in younger, socially and environmentally conscious customers to explore the potential of a second-hand retail experience.  Plus, in working with some of Australia’s biggest charity brands, any lessons learned throughout the five weeks can be shared with players in the field to then integrate into their own store networks.  “What we’re really hoping to learn is how doing retail differently can attract customers in-store – how can merchandising in a certain way allow your average units per transaction to go up? How can setting menswear and womenswear next to each other affect sales?” Perera said.  “And then, how can we look at the consumer insights we gain and tweak how we’re trading and merchandising in-store to see if the results will change? It’s a different way of doing charity retail, and there’ll be a lot of lessons.” Creating curation When you think of the traditional op-shop, you’d be forgiven for imagining a sea of old furniture, DVDs, books and whatever else has ended up on the shelves. But in restricting what the Charity Shop? sells to just fashion, Perera hopes the store can tap into a burgeoning desire for more sustainable ways of clothing yourself.  “The number one way to be sustainable with your apparel is to be naked – the number two way is to shop at a second-hand store,” Perera said.  “That space is expanding. The Millennial customer wants to shop in that space, but we want to look at how we can target them and get them into our stores. I’m from a retail background, so I want to try to help Salvos and the Brotherhood, for example, curate their offers to make people want to shop there. “These brands have 1000s of stores around the country, if they can take learnings from this one shop that we have for five weeks and implement them, the spread of that could be huge.” The store’s target is to offset 47,000 tonnes of carbon emissions through the sale of pre-owned clothing over the five weeks; proceeds from the store will go toward supporting environmental and social causes. Perera added that every business involved is offering its services pro bono. The next step, she said, is to take the lessons learned during this pop-up and apply it to more.  “It’ll be about, ‘How did this go? What lessons did we learn? And what more do we want to learn? I think there’s definitely an opportunity to do a lot more of this,” Perera said.