Many big retailers have cancelled clothing orders due to lockdowns. Lost Stock sells surplus items direct to consumers, supporting garment workers in Bangladesh
With shops across Europe and the US closed due to lockdowns, many retailers have cancelled orders for clothes leaving factories with piles of surplus stock and unable to pay staff. During the first lockdown, orders worth more than $2bn (£1.5bn) were reportedly cancelled or suspended in Bangladesh alone.
Enter Lost Stock, an impactful retail business that sells boxes of surplus clothes from manufacturers in Bangladesh directly to customers in the UK, providing factories with much needed revenue and workers with money to feed their families.
“We focused on Bangladesh because their economy is so reliant on clothing manufacture and there isn’t really the same support network that you’d find in other countries,” founder Cally Russell told Positive News.
Lost Stock aimed to sell 50,000 boxes by the end of 2020, but by August the company had more than doubled that. It has since started selling boxes to customers in Australia, the USA and some parts of Europe.
“I hope that maybe coronavirus will actually build a better world for us all, because we’ll think about things differently. What we’ve seen with this project is that, at a time of hardship in the world, people have decided to do some good with their purchases,” Russell said.
Main image: Lost Stock
