Trailblazing Selfridges to dive even deeper into sustainability

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Sep 2, 2022

Selfridges may be under new ownership but its focus on sustainability hasn't lessened. In fact, the retailer is going even deeper into the area and said that in response to demand, it wants almost half of its interactions with its customers to be based on resale, repair, rental and refill by the start of the next decade.

It's aiming to accelerate its current actions after seeing fast growth in areas such as secondhand sales (up 240% to almost 18,000 pieces last year) and repair (28,000+ repairs last year with over a third of them being sneakers). The company also sold over 8,000 refills and rented over 2,000 items to customers.

The company — which has four UK branches including its Oxford Street, London location that has been the flagship for its circularity drive — wants the Reselfridges initiative to make up 45% of future transactions and to also take in Manchester and Birmingham.

MD Andrew Keith said the company needs to commit to a "significant and fundamental shift" in the way it does business and that the new owners of the company are excited about the prospect.

Selfridges Group has been taken over by a conglomerate comprising Thailand-based Central Group and Austria’s Signa Holding in a £4 billion a deal that completed recently.

The company has been running its Project Earth plan for a couple of years and Keith sees this as a launchpad for what will be a much more sustainable business model in the future. At present, only a tiny percentage of transactions with shoppers are based on circular model but it's clearly focused on changing that and not on simply nodding to sustainability.

It will mean a rapid expansion of sustainable services to all branches and the company making it easier to do things such as booking repairs online. 

The retailer is set to open trainer repair workshops in Birmingham and Manchester after seeing success in London. And Oxford Street will also get a denim repair service by year-end.

The categories offered by its rental initiative will also expand and its refill options will become more prominent.