This online vintage shop’s new initiative is a great way to combat impulse buying

By Erin Lindsay
29th Oct 2019

This online vintage shop’s new initiative is a great way to combat impulse buying

UK-based vintage shop Beyond Retro has just introduced a new way to update your wardrobe guilt-free — and high street shops should take note

Online shopping has revolutionised (and made far easier) how we feed our shopping habits. But easy one-click buys and endless discount codes make it almost impossible to stay away from multiple impulse buys a month — even when we try to be sustainably minded, like buying second hand or vintage pieces.

But more and more online shops are making an effort to curb fast fashion habits, and the latest initiative from UK vintage shop Beyond Retro is genius.

Beyond Retro, which has eight standalone stores in the UK and Sweden, as well as a massive online selection, has introduced their Return & Earn policy in an effort to “close the loop on fashion waste”.

As a customer, you can buy second-hand pieces from their online store and wear them freely for up to a year. Then, if you no longer want them, you can send the items back to Beyond Retro, and earn back 30% of the original purchase price to spend on the site again.

This way, you can continue to update your wardrobe with unique vintage pieces as often as you like, and close the cycle of fast fashion a little more every time.

Return & Earn is an amazing way to feed your fashion instincts while being thoughtful about how you consume new clothing — we waste an incredible amount of clothing every year, with much of it going to landfill. Second-hand and vintage is growing as a trend, but we need to do a lot more if we want to move towards fully sustainable wardrobes.

Beyond Retro, along with their parent company, rehomed 90 million items last year in the UK — 10% of the UK’s total textile waste. High street stores should take note — although some do similar sustainability initiatives, like H&M’s vouchers-for-clothes exchange, fast fashion is still dominating our favourite brands.

But it’s up to the consumer to make better choices too, like heading to a vintage or second-hand resource like Beyond Retro for our new outfit. All this, and they’ve got a great eye for vintage pieces too — here are some of our favourite pieces available on their site.