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Mary Portas officially opens Edinburgh charity boutique

TV retail advisor and Save the Children Ambassador, Mary Portas will be officially opening her designer charity shop in Stockbridge on Tuesday, 1st December at 10.30 am.

Tuesday 1 December 2009

The Queen of Shops will be on hand to meet shoppers and help them find a bargain.

Mary’s Living and Giving Shop for Save the Children sells a huge range of designer bargains and top notch high street fashion and opened its doors on Saturday, to queues of people, many of whom had been waiting for hours.

The shop has already been hailed a success after it took over £5k on the opening day — an unprecedented amount for a charity shop.
Mary Portas said: “This is a shop for everyone and we want it to be a place that will inspire Edinburgh to give. The designer bargains in our charity shop are fantastic and the store has the potential to attract people from across the whole of Scotland.

“We want to create a real buzz around second hand shopping and make the old fashioned charity shop a thing of the past. It may seem crazy to sell such quality goods at reasonable prices, but the money raised will be well spent and it costs as little as £5 to save a child’s life”.

Some of the stock in the brand new Save the Children Stockbridge boutique has been donated by some well-known faces such as Meg Matthews, Peaches Geldof and Lauren Lavern and fashion mag Grazia has been topping up the rails with designers goodies.
Local people are being urged to take clothes to donate and become ‘shopping neutral’ — ensuring that for every item they buy, they donate something back.

Mary began working with Save the Children this year as she overhauled their shop in Orpington, Kent as part of a three-part TV series, ‘Mary Queen of Charity Shops’. The programme culminated in a designer ‘pop-up charity shop’ in Westfield Shopping Centre in London, which with the help of Grazia magazine, raised a whopping £109,000 for charity in just three weeks.

The success of the partnership has led Mary to continue her work with Save the Children and this is her first permanent charity shop with four more in the pipeline across the UK. Mary Portas’ retail strategy agency, Yellowdoor, have been responsible for the shop refit and the décor is unique and stylish with some surprises inside.

Rob McMillan, Save the Children’s Retail Manager for Scotland said: “We’re all really looking forward to meeting Mary. Our opening day on Saturday was incredible — the shop was packed all day and we constantly had to restock the rails. Customers were taking clothes to the changing rooms and swapping them with other customers and people seemed genuinely delighted at the bargains they found. We hope the rush will continue when Mary is here and she can see just how successful the shop has been, it has been so phenomenal”.

Located in fashionable Stockbridge, Mary’s Living and Giving shop for Save the Children is housed in the former HBOS bank at 34 Raeburn Place and counts delis, jewellery stores and coffee houses amongst its neighbours.

As well as selling donated fashion and accessories the new boutique provides space for local small businesses to set up shop and sell their wares helping to bring the community into the store.

Local businesses can get involved too. Save the Children are also encouraging Edinburgh businesses to hold a Donate Don’t Dump Day — or ‘D-Day’, where staff can bring unwanted clothes to work and Save the Children will come and pick them up.

Mary’s Living and Giving Shop for Save the Children is at 34 Raeburn Place, Stockbridge, Edinburgh EH4 1HN and is open 10am — 5pm every day. Mary will be instore from 10.30am on Tuesday 1st December.