You should be shopping with Lost Stock
Do you want a box of high street fashion clothes delivered from the factory straight to your front door – and to do your bit for a good cause in the process?
Now I’ve got your attention, haven’t I? Good, because this is the whole concept behind Lost Stock, a new programme from an Edinburgh-based start-up.
Thanks to the current Coronavirus shutdown, most high street clothes shops in the UK are shut. This means they are not buying in new stock. However, the clothes they were supposed to be selling have still been made and the workers who made them rely on their wares being sold to earn their pay.
This is where Lost Stock comes in. For £35 and a few details about your size and style preferences, the company will put together a box of clothes which you would otherwise have found on the high street this summer and ship it to your door. Your money, minus the cost of postage, goes straight to the workers themselves.
Most of the factories are based in Bangladesh, as that is where the majority of high street clothes are made, and the country says the four million people there who work in the fashion industry are facing a crisis after high street retailers such as Debenhams, New Look and Arcadia (which owns Topman and Topshop, among others) cancelled an estimated £2.5bn worth of orders when the Coronavirus lockdown struck.
All that means there are a lot of clothes lying around looking for a good home.
Sustainability has been a big topic in fashion recently and while questions over high street fast fashion are not going away, this is a good way to give something back to those making the clothes at a tough time for us all.
And, let’s be honest, most of us have spent more on less useful internet purchases over the recent weeks, haven’t we?
I have ordered my box – XS all round, of course – and will let you know what I get when it arrives. To date, 30,000 boxes have been sold, to get yours, click here.
