Marks & Spencer’s Shwopping initiative with Oxfam has been awarded the Corporate Social Responsibility Initiative of the Year.

Joanna Lumley fronting a Shwopping ad

In the fast-paced world of fashion retail, waste is a big worry. The perennial quest to keep up with the latest trends means that more than 1 billion items of clothing end up in UK landfill sites every year - the equivalent of nearly 10,000 every five minutes.

‘Shwopping’ is Marks & Spencer’s bid to re-engage customers with the value of clothes while making money for a worthwhile cause. Shoppers can return old items of clothing to all of its 342 stores nationwide, where they will be reused, recycled or resold through Oxfam shops, helping to raise money for the charity.

Customers can then visit the Shwopping page of the M&S website to see how their donations will help Oxfam.

For instance, £20 could help supply three families with food for 10 days during an emergency by providing basic rations or the cash vouchers to buy it, while £5 could help buy a container for four families in Niger to help keep water disease-free.

The initiative builds on M&S’s previous Oxfam Clothes Exchange, which rewarded customers with a £5 M&S voucher for taking unwanted M&S clothes to an Oxfam branch. It was this continuity of approach that impressed one of the judges, who says it was commendable that the retailer was “building on something that it had done in the past”.

The difference with Shwopping is that, rather than offering financial incentives to consumers, the motivation for returning clothes is entirely driven by the idea of shopping more responsibly while making money for a worthy cause.

Customers can return any unwanted items rather than just M&S garments, making recycling as easy as possible.

The fact that Shwopping seeks to engage consumers with an important yet often unrecognised issue has played well with the judges. “We live in such a wasteful world, so the idea of addressing this is good,” says one.

“A line of thinking that says ‘sell one, reuse one’ rather than ‘sell one, dump one’ is very positive.”

Once the Shwopping concept had been established, the next challenge was to engage consumers with the initiative. M&S created a 360-degree marketing campaign across multiple channels including press, TV, outdoor, and social media, aimed at generating awareness of the initiative. On the day of its launch, an east London street was transformed using 9,513 discarded items of clothing - the same amount of garments thrown away every day in the UK.

During the first eight weeks after the launch, half a million items were Shwopped by customers, and to date more than 2 million items have been Shwopped, generating more than £1.3m for Oxfam. But what really set Shwopping apart as a corporate social responsibility initiative in the eyes of the judges was the fact that the campaign was much more than just a glorified bring-and-buy sale, and at its heart was the aim of bringing about a long-term shift in the culture of how people shop and how they value the clothes they buy.

One judge notes the campaign was particularly brave in so far as it had “the potential to cost M&S sales”. The retailer, however, notes that the initiative makes long-term commercial sense because the high street fashion industry will need to change in the coming years and decades to address the concerns of ethical consumption and global imbalance.

In the long term, M&S hopes that Shwopping will go some way towards making recycling clothes as routine a habit as recycling plastic and cardboard is today. Results so far suggest that M&S is on the way to achieving that aim.

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