Students Develop Innovative Thrifting Experience

by Clara Pina and the Salvation Army Media Team @sathriftstore

A partnership between Humber College and the Salvation Army Thrift Store gave Fashion Management students the opportunity to develop improvements for the perimeter wall inside the store in Port Credit to increase sales per square foot.

To begin, students interacted with members of the Salvation Army Thrift Store management team for a Q&A to learn more about the organization, merchandising practices and main challenges.

In phase two of the project, students and faculty members spent the morning exploring the store, finding items and scanning them with their phones using Polycam - a 3D scanning app.

In the final phase, the students presented their ideas in a virtual meeting to the Salvation Army Thrift Store executive panel. “It was refreshing to see what up-and-coming students took from our thrift store and their creativity provided some real outside-the-box thinking!”, said 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 the winning team Arvinder Kaur, Hoi Ching Yim, Lakshita Tandon, Mengzhou He, Roaa Abdalla, Roop Kanwal and Samridhi Bharadwaj for their 3D store design.

Thank you to all participants for their enthusiasm, creativity and fantastic presentations, as well as all the Humber College faculty members, Vladimira Steffek, Rossie Kadiyska and David Neumann and the Salvation Army Thrift Store National Organization team members Tonny Colon, Ted Houghton, Clara Pina and Clarizza who made this initiative possible.

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