Today we were involved in an international women’s day event that merged women led local community groups with an upcycling event focused on ladies clothing!

This idea was the brain child of Tirza from Slough Anti Litter group supported by Riffat and Clarissa from The Slough Bid; Rosa from Together As One (and GoodGym); Sbba from Asian Star Radio and Knit your socks off; Samina from Sakoon through Cancer and Knit your socks off; Bep from Thrive365; Claire from I Got Style and of course us!

Each group had a host of volunteers supporting the event from set up to swap shop to manning stalls to panel interviews to decant! Well done to all the team members. Great unity!

Need some hanger management?

So we started the day by helping to hang up already donated items. Sut was already on it by the time I arrived. So I hanged around letting her get on with it.

We soon had a few rails already to go and dressed to impress! Just needed customers now.

Has that cardi-gone?

So what is a swap shop? It’s an up recycling event whereby you can select up to 10 items to donate, pay a donation fee, bring in your clothes to the swap assistants (us), and collect tokens for the value of your items which can then be used against other donated items!

We had a tight slot of 30 minutes to receive the swap items, code them to a value (we had a Strava vs parkrun coding system going on so as to not offend anyone if we thought the value was lower (parkrun … sorry parkrun we love you really), or higher value items aka Strava! We then dished out the tokens for the customers to use against other clothes.

Dior to Dior sales

Although the event was a pre book event we didn’t want passerby’s to have FOMO so we had Agni out in the mall handing out flyers letting people know that they could come in too!

Purse-Shoe your Dreams

Whilst the swap assistants were busy sorting and hanging, there were workshops and panels interviews going on where some really insightful and heart warming stories were being shared… I loved that Anita loves red (we have a tshirt just waiting for her), Samina loves trainers (we know where you can use those!) and Claire’s advise on wearing a different colour each day next week might just be my challenge (I’m sure I have race t-shirts in every colour of the rainbow).

Even The Mayor Amjad Abassi and local MP Tan Dhesi came along to support the event.

Really positive feedback from the customers with loads being ‘bought’ during the swap shop opening time.

Thank you to the team for getting involved.