One Cherry is a start up marketplace set up with the aim to help second hand shops and particularly the charity sector to sell online.
The aim of One Cherry is to make it easy for people to use charity shops and to do so in a more sustainable manner. Charity shop’s strength is their diverse range of goods, but their weakness is that you never know what you’ll find until you get there. One Cherry aim to make this vast amount of stock spread across different charity shops visible to buy online.
To start with One Cherry are focusing on clothing, noting that in 2017/18 charity shops alone kept over 327,000 tonnes of textiles out of landfill, reducing CO2 emissions by 7m tonnes. One Cherry want to encourage more people to start reusing items by providing shops with a user-friendly and easy-to-use mobile app to start reaching local customers online and connecting people to an existing network of over 13,000 second-hand shops spread around the UK.
Starting out in Edinburgh this is still an early stage project – to be successful and see rapid expansion the One Cherry need to convince the major Charities with hundreds of location to sign up. However the circular economy concept is valid – the number of charity shops on our high streets wouldn’t be there if consumers didn’t shop in them.
Currently search is limited to what’s effectively a category filter, but with the relatively low number of goods on sale compared to larger marketplace it’s perfectly adequate currently. Descriptions are sparse, but most offers have plenty of images to balance this.
No matter how large a charity shop is, they still have the issue of limited space in which to display their goods and that whilst they may have the perfect item for an individual customer, it may well be at a different branch and will never be seen. One Cherry solves this by bringing the stock into a single portal and yet still encouraging customers to collect in person.
Whilst collection in person is the norm, over the Winter as a special promotion One Cherry have been offering free delivery within Edinburgh’s EH1 to EH10 postcodes. They only use reusable packaging and all deliveries are made by cyclists in keeping with their sustainable credentials.
One Cherry is an interesting concept offering a range of benefits to Charity shops from extending their opening hours to 24/7 online to raising awareness and bringing more footfall into stores when consumers collect their purchases. It’s a long way from nationwide dominance, but it is a very neat concept so if you’re based in or around the Edinburgh area have a browse and give One Cherry a try.
2 Responses
Seriously, is nothing sacred anymore!!? Why the hell does everything have to be online? I love to browse my local charity shops of a Saturday morning having no idea what I might find and perchance bump in to a friend or grab a coffee too. So this bullshit idea will mean just as I have found a nice item, for it to be grabbed out of my hand by the till worker who tells me it was purchased by an online bidder 5 minutes ago! Plus, with turnover of stock in a charity shop fairly brisk how are they going to list all these items and who is going to do it, before they have been snapped up by people who actually want to go out, get some air and peruse the ‘actual’ shops?
A message from me to the idiots behing ‘One Cherry’ – go and do something useful and stop messing around with something that works perfectly well already!