Page 52 - bne_Magazine_February_2019

52 I Central Europe bne February 2019
A secondhand clothing store in Tirana, Albania.
Castoff clothing
a $770mn business in Eastern Europe
Romanian style blogger Ioana Moldo- vanu of Ioana spune (Ioana says) is
one secondhand shopping enthusiast who estimated that around 75% of
her clothes are pre-loved, and she also buys a significant share of used shoes, accessories and gadgets. Explaining the reasons for her buying choices, she tells bne IntelliNews by email: “First of all the price. I like to have many clothes to rotate and find real treasures at incred- ibly low prices ... My style is somewhat classic so I’m not looking for unusual pieces but rather for quality stuff.”
Quality is an important issue for many secondhand shoppers, who seek out well-constructed clothes from high qual- ity fabrics. “First of all, you find articles from famous companies (which means very good quality) at comparable or even lower prices than new clothes sold on the market stalls. People with open minds and no prejudices prefer to buy an Adidas outfit from natural fibres (even if worn several times) at a lower price than a new but no name polyester blouse,” Moldovanu explains.
This is helping to lift the stigma long associated with secondhand clothing which was, and to an extent still is, seen as cheap, dirty and fit only for the poor- est of the poor – though, Moldovanu claims, “those with the biggest mouths do their shopping secondhand but in secret”.
Secondhand stigma
If Maria Stoican was trying to dispel this negative image of secondhand shop- ping, she would be doing a good job. The Romanian businesswoman and mother of one looks fresh and immacu- late in a denim skirt and pale pink t-shirt with an appliquéd fish skeleton on the front when we meet in a cafe opposite Bucharest’s Cismigiu park to talk about her company.
Confined to her home during the last few months of a difficult pregnancy, Stoican needed work she could do with- out leaving the house, and so MyDress- ing was born, shortly before her son came along. The business run by Stoican and her husband remained small during the first couple of years of parenthood
Clare Nuttall in Bucharest and Tirana
Countries across Central, Southeast and Eastern Europe imported
a massive 593mn kilogrammes
of used textiles, mainly clothing, valued at $771mn in 2017. This means the region absorbed around a quarter of the just under $3bn worth of used textiles imported globally in 2017, with other major destinations being South Asia and West Africa.
Within the former eastern bloc coun- tries, the biggest clothes importers in 2017 were Ukraine and Russia, both
of which imported around $150mn of used textiles, with substantial flows also entering Bulgaria, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland and Romania, data from the UN’s Comtrade database shows, though some countries now act more as sorting hubs than final destinations.
Incomes in the region are low compared to developed countries, but steadily rising, and growing consumption by the expanding middle classes is an impor- tant driver of growth. Consumers want to emulate the lifestyles they see in west- ern countries, which creates a voracious appetite for consumer goods from cars to
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fashionable clothes, but in many cases their incomes aren’t yet high enough to buy new high quality items. Instead, they rely on imports of used goods from West- ern Europe, the US and other developed economies.
The trend is highly visible in the Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) region, where the economic boom of the last few years has accelerated income growth, though in most countries salaries still lag behind those in Western Europe. New clothing is available from an ever growing range of international retailers, but even the fast fashion chains seen as cheap by western shoppers are relatively high priced for their counterparts in the east.
This has sustained the market for second- hand clothing that started to thrive in the years immediately after the collapse of communism and experienced a dramatic growth spurt amid the boom of the mid 2000s. And unlike the markets for higher priced new consumer goods, demand
for used clothing continued going strong through the international economic crisis and – despite a dip in 2013 – has persisted in the last few years too.