Innovation, fashion and thrifting can go hand in hand! Proof of that is our partnership with Humber College. Students of their Fashion Postgraduate Certificate Program were tasked with developing improvements for the perimeter wall of our Port Credit Thrift Store to increase sales per square foot.
For them to successfully meet this challenge, we ran Q&A sessions where students had a chance to interact with members of The Salvation Army Thrift Store management team and learn more about our organization, our current merchandising practices, and our main challenges. As a second phase of the project, students and faculty members spent a whole morning at our Port Credit store exploring our fab finds and scanning them with their cell phones using Polycam, a 3D scan software. Check out the following video to see how easy it is to use this technology.
For the final round, students presented their ideas to our executive panel in a virtual meeting. “It was refreshing to see what our local up-and-coming students took from our Thrift Store, and their creativity provided some real outside-the-box thinking!”, says Melanie Burgos, Port Credit Store Manager. “Although all the teams had great ideas, we had to pick a winner and that was team 1. Their 3D Model was versatile and could easily be adjusted to display various types of products. Moreover, their presentation in general was feasible and realistic while considering very real business focused territories such as accessibility and labour costs.”
Congratulations to Arvinder Kaur, Hoi Ching Yim, Lakshita Tandon, Mengzhou He, Roaa Abdalla, Roop Kanwal and Samridhi Bharadwaj for winning our Merchandising project challenge! We also want to thank all participants for their enthusiasm, creativity and fantastic presentations, as well as all Humber College faculty members, Vladimira Steffek, Rossie Kadiyska and David Neumann and our NRO team members who made this initiative possible.