Clothes Donation
Tips and Tricks on Clothes Donation
During the most recent purge. We ended up donating most of our clothes to Savers. Savers is a privately held for-profit thrift store retailer offering second-hand merchandise. They take any donation and their distributors see what items can be sold as second-hand merchandise.
According to financial documents, Savers keeps roughly 83 cents of every dollar it takes in, while the supported charities get only 17 percent.
Our goal wasn't to support savers. Our goal was to donate old clothes to people that may need it. We wanted to get it out of the house and not throw it away.
We did throw away some clothes that were in poor condition - such as holes or had really bad food stains. (Why did we keep them?)
Five Things We Learned
Check various local sources that accept clothing donations. There are some places that may specialize in distributing only children's clothes.
Read up on what places are accepting what. A good read is the "Items we Accept" by the Cradles to Crayons in Boston. The Recycling Partners PDF is a excellent list of places that accept items that you may have.
We reached out to the Facebook community to see if people are looking for certain clothes. We didn't sell them, just let them know the size and season that we had available.
There's no reason to hold on to all the kid's clothes. It's okay to keep a few things that may have sentimental value. However, keeping every item doesn't make sense for future children. You may find that the next child may need certain clothes in different seasons.
We found that clothes stored in bins with lock lids did better than clothes in trash bags. We'll never use trash bags as a means to store clothes - even for seasonal clothes.