Give Your Best: 2024 Reflections
By Heather Snowden
The past year has been a monumental one for Give Your Best. With your collaboration, we have helped to clothe over 3,500 people and processed over 45,000 items of clothing so far — items that may have otherwise ended up in landfill or incinerated. That’s a huge accomplishment. And we’re only just getting started. An estimated 5.5 million people (approx 13% of the UK population) currently live in clothing poverty, so there’s still a long way to go. But while there’s always more work to be done, we wanted to take a minute to reflect on some of our biggest achievements in 2024, because as you’ll soon see, there has been quite a lot!
We Went to Parliament
Give Your Best hosted a roundtable at the Houses of Parliament at the start of the year. In partnership with Baroness Hayman of Ullock, we invited fashion brands, industry activists, and journalists from outlets including Business of Fashion and Vogue. We discussed the widespread issue of clothing poverty in the UK in contrast to the monumental amount of textile waste this country sends to landfill each year (approx £140 million worth), and the ways in which the fashion industry and the government could work together to alleviate the problem.
The main takeaway, as we expected, is that without legislation and enforced accountability, most brands can’t afford (or don’t choose) to redistribute because it’s so expensive. But with the wave of legislation being passed across Europe, it’s not long before UK brands will have to start rethinking their current ways of operating, and when that happens GYB will be on hand to help. You can read more about our findings here.
We launched a nationwide billboard campaign
Over the summer we launched an incredible billboard campaign in collaboration with JCDecaux, who helped us to spread the GYB message and mission across the UK for a month. We were spotted in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Bristol, Brighton, Sheffield, Leeds, and many other cities.
The message of the campaign was simple: Even a single item of clothing has the power to change someone’s life. And it was extremely effective. In just one month, we saw over 40,000 visitors arrive to our site and hundreds of items of clothing donated to our community.
We opened a shop!
In June we opened the UK’s first ever pay-it-forward clothing store in Islington Square Arcade — it started as a pop-up in collaboration with Round Retail before going solo in September. The GYB store functions like a regular charity shop but with a twist. All items in the store are donated by our partner brands or by members of the public; shopping works on a credit-like system in which each garment purchased enables someone in need (who pre-register) to shop for free.
This system also gives an opportunity for someone otherwise excluded from the act of shopping to have an empowering, inclusive in-store shopping experience. Ultimately, it’s about much more than just clothing.
The GYB store is also an event and learning space, hosting educational workshops every week on a range of topics — from how to make cushions and repair your clothes (we’re also launching an in-store repair service) to explainers on the asylum experience in the UK & how you can get involved. Come say hello!
We were featured on the BBC
The shop was such a success that within a few months we got a full segment feature and article write up on the BBC.
We were featured in Vogue, too!
We won amazing grants
We were honoured to be the recipient of multiple amazing grants this year. We were chosen as one of the 6 winners of eBay’s Circular Fashion Fund, which has massively impacted the work we’ve been able to carry out this year. The fund was set up to recognise innovative businesses who are actively changing how the world thinks about circular fashion, and grants the selected organisations £15,000 to help make that vision a reality. The prize money and masterclass programme have been invaluable to establish our partnerships programs and launch projects such as our Bestie Bins this year.
We also won grants from ReLondon, which helped to launch the Repair project, the National Lottery Community Fund, which aided our store launch, Hatch Enterprise, which further supported our Bestie Bin project, and from the Doc Martens Foundation, which has just been a huge help in general. We could not be more grateful for everyone who has supported our growth this year <3
Building the GYB team!
This year, we’ve finally been able to hire a core-team who are working tirelessly to grow GYB into a sustainable business. In addition to our founder Sol Escobar, the GYB dream team now comprises Rebecca Schmidt as Co-CEO, Chloe Dreux as Operations Lead, Davina Ebikeme as Partnerships Lead, Cristina Zaralejos as Shop Team, Kemi Ogunlana as Shop Team and Head Seamstress, Anna-Maria Wohlgemuth in the Marketing Team and Benita Bolumbu in the Online Platform Team. Most of these wonderful humans are in the group pic above, which was taken during a team night out to the London Fashion Awards.
Otherwise, GYB is powered by volunteers, because, as always, collaboration is key <3
Happy New Year! Here’s to a beautiful 2025.