Mary Portas boutique charity shop opens to queue of 100

Fundraising | Celina Ribeiro | 24 Nov 2009

Mary Portas, ‘Queen of Shops’, has opened her first boutique charity store for Save the Children in Edinburgh’s Stockbridge area to a waiting queue of 100 shoppers.

The retail ‘guru’ is behind the new upmarket store, which features celebrity cast-offs as well as second-hand designer label gear, part of her efforts to revitalise charity shops for the children’s charity, for which she is an ‘ambassador’.

The ‘Living and Giving Shop’ opened at 10am last Saturday and recorded £5,500 in sales over the first day.

The store will also support local craftspeople on a 50/50 basis, the artisan keeps 50 per cent of their goods sold through the Save the Children store and donates the remainder to the charity.

Portas said she hopes the store will inspire Edinburgh locals to give. “The designer bargains in our charity shop will be fantastic and the store has the potential to attract people from across the whole of Scotland,” she said.

Rob McMillan, Save the Children’s retail manager for Scotland said, the shop is “set to cause a revolution in charity shop shopping”.

“It will be very much a local store, embracing all that is exceptional about Edinburgh and we hope it will be a real destination shop. We will work with people in the city, whether they are fashionistas or people who make jam and local produce which they wish to sell in the shop. It’s an extremely exciting and totally unique concept,” he said.

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