Report on HospiceShops for the end of the Financial Year 2019

Our retail group has completed a very successful year of sales, expansion and repositioning in the highly competitive charity shop sector.  A review was completed around shop signage, product range, pricing and how we present our shop environments.  These are changes are now almost completely integrated across our network. 

We opened a new retail shop in Waitara in Princess Street with a great team of volunteers and staff.  This shop is now well established in the community and surrounding districts as the go to charity shop in town.  We are achieving fantastic support for donations and other services from the local community.

Our own Trade Me sales division has been launched from our Warehouse site.  Sales are exceeding expectations and the volumes through this site grow monthly.  This change is partly in compensation of reducing the number of public auctions as this part of our sales model has changed significantly in the past few years.  We are now also placing a wider range of antique/collectible/auction type items directly into our retail shops.  

Jessica Sinclair, our North Group Retail Manager and Tania Brown, our South Group Retail Manager, have both had significant impact with the improvements implemented over this year.  They lead their respective managers and areas to a very high standard of service and presentation positioning us as the major charity shop operator in our region.

As always our fantastic teams of volunteers support employed staff across all sites.  This year over one hundred thousand hours was donated to us by people working at our warehouse and five retail shops.  This has an enormous impact on maximising the net surplus we can transfer to support our free of charge care services across the province.

In closing, I would like to acknowledge the amazing community support we receive from those who donate items for sale and purchase products from our HospiceShops.  We now average over 31,000 sales each month over our retail group - testament to how well are are supported by the communities where we provide our services.

Paul Lamb, Chief Executive.