Since 2020 Gen Z have been charity shopping addicts; frantically searching through rails and bins to find the best steals, looking for designer and vintage amongst the broken and worn. Apps such as Vinted, Depop and Vestiare Collective have greatly benefitted from this trend, with Vinted growing from 34m users at the end of 2020 to 105m in 2023, but is this frugal frenzy coming to an end?
In June, the British Heart Foundation announced they would be closing 150 stores, showing that there is no longer the same level of demand for in person charity shops as there was a year or two ago. But is this because second hand shoppers have turned to the apps, or are people just not buying as much pre-loved anymore? According to Vinted’s statistics, it’s the latter. Vinted’s growth rate dropped from a whopping 61 per cent in 2023 to a lower 38 per cent in 2025. Now this could partly be because the market is becoming slightly saturated, but what is more likely is that the trend is dying down.
The charity shopping craze has long been masked as an environmental consideration – which it partly is – but the desire to own a completely unique piece of clothing outweighs it. The longing to avoid feeling gorgeous in your new outfit only to see someone else also wearing it, means that the green factor was very minimal in this trend’s explosion. But now the uniqueness isn’t as unique anymore. With fewer people shopping first hand, you can happily buy from big brands and not be caught unintentionally twinning. And the thrill of shopping in a way that wasn’t customary has worn away with the soles of shoes that have been passed around the charity shops three times already.
However, I don’t believe this will last long. Charity shopping has become such a normality amongst Gen Z that buying second hand will never vanish completely, but a return to charity shops seems a bit more far-fetched. Spending the time trying to find the best items in your local Marie Curie becomes tedious and annoying when you can search from them online, find exactly what you want, and have it delivered to your house. It has also become increasingly hard to sell clothes via charity shops in comparison to selling online, meaning there is less clothing in these shops to be bought. Ultimately, charity shopping seems to be a dying art, but at least we were the generation that for a second tried to bring it back.
Photo by Kiko Camaclang on Unsplash.
