In 2018, Jen Cooper, the owner of a vintage clothing store, and Taylor Watts, who owned a record store, identified a massive market inefficiency in the thrift and used goods industry.
“We began investigating mass market thrift,” Cooper says, “and what we found was really disturbing.” While niche goods are difficult to find and high margin, the conventional thrift industry was experiencing an overflow problem. About 84 percent of clothing donations end up in the landfill or burned, Cooper says, and used goods make up 10 percent of global landfill.
Watts and Cooper began attending overflow auctions for major thrift stores. They saw what Cooper describes as an astronomical amount of waste–think furniture sitting outside and truckloads of goods on sale for about $30. They ended up buying a couple of truckloads and taking it home to see what was inside. In the very first load, they found a sealed moving box containing about $400 worth of crystal.“ And the thing is, I don’t want to give the impression that these thrift stores are doing anything wrong,” Cooper noted. “It’s that there is just an absolutely massive oversupply of product, and there’s very, very little demand for it.”
“And we were thinking there are so many people in our community that don’t have what they need,” she added. “There are so many people that just buy, buy, buy—they do have the money to buy, but why are they only buying new when there’s such an excess supply of used goods? And how do we change the market to make people want to buy more used goods?”
By 2019, the two had established a name and a mission: Thrift for Good would provide an outlet for buying and donating used goods. The Hurst store opened in 2020, and a Denton location followed in 2022. A Cleburne location is slated to open in August 2025.
The company is enjoying the fruits of donations. Thrift for Good must close donations from time to time in order to allow the organization to process product. A big plus for donors is that Thrift for Good sends 25 percent of proceeds from the product sold to a charity of the donor’s choice. Registered benefactors include everything from local churches and school groups to larger organizations like the American Heart Association and the Children’s Advocacy Center of North Texas. The brand has donated over $200,000 to charities.
The company has also established its own charitable foundation to create a storage of products that may not meet Thrift for Good quality standards but that can still be used. TFG Supply provides resources like clothing, household appliances, dishes, and more to local charities. The charitable supply has donated over 60,000 used items to local charities since January 2023. The foundation arm of the charity facilitates up to $150,000 in grant funding per year to help nonprofits with developing sustainable infrastructure and acquiring resources efficiently. Of the grant funding provided, 34 percent has gone to food insecurity and health services, 21 percent has gone to housing and the homeless community, and 20 percent has gone to children’s programs or education. Funding has also supported the arts, pets, and other areas of giving.
Thrift for Good uses one central location in Hurst to process the used goods it takes in. While traditional thrift stores tends to process donations on-site at individual locations, Cooper says that method could lead to deficiencies, especially in rural areas. “If the problem is an oversupply of used goods in the market, we should be distributing those used goods out,” she said. “And so we process everything in one location.” The goal is to grow that “hub-and-spoke” model over the long term.
While Thrift for Good has been profitable in months here and there, Cooper said, the business as a whole is hoping to see profitability by 2025 when the Cleburne store opens. In order to balance the cost of its large-footprint processing center in Hurst, the company will need about three stores up and running, she said. The hope is that the center can serve five retail stores as well as smaller wholesale clients. “We believe our comparative advantage lies in our back-end process,” Cooper said. “Our ability to get a consistent volume of product on the floor, in season, and of very good quality depends on us having a large enough warehouse to amass, quality check and sort tens of thousands of individual items into about one thousand item types.”
The company is tackling the used goods conundrum from multiple other angles, too. That includes setting up stores like a traditional retail space (clothing is organized by product type rather than being hung in mass together, for example), and introducing a personal styling program. But it also includes forging a tech component that Cooper hopes will expand beyond the business itself.
Thrift for Good is building a unique software tailor-made for the thrift industry. “I think most people would be really astonished at how conventional thrift works, that there’s almost no technology supporting it or behind it,” Cooper said. “We see ourselves as a tech company, and we’ve been working on our technology from the very beginning. We’re really finally starting to get to the point where we can intersect the technology we’ve created with our actual processes in the store.”
As product comes into Thrift For Good, it’s sorted into one of 800 item types. “Our computer knows exactly how many of each item we have back there,” Cooper said. “It knows exactly how many of each of those item types is supposed to be stocked on our retail floor.” As items are purchased, the system is able to automatically order product from the fulfillment center. If an item sits on the floor for too long, the system can automatically prompt a discount.
The system aims to add efficiency to the process, but that doesn’t come without a need for nuance in the world of used goods. “In a new goods scenario, you just get to decide how many pairs of denim shorts you’re going to sell in a year, and then you order that many,” Cooper said. “In used goods, you have to say, ‘Well, how many am I potentially going to get? How long is it going to take me to sell through those things? How long can I stock them for? And how many should I put out?’”
For now, Cooper said, the solution rests in AI, where the system will absorb information on how much product is coming in and looks at sell-through rates and at how those fit into timeframes through the year. Thrift for Good is also using AI for price generation—an area where Cooper sees a lot of room for improvement in conventional thrift.
“You’ll see people complaining that conventional thrift has gotten really high on its prices, but I think that the problem is really that they’re just operating on averages,” Cooper said. “They price the stuff that’s low end and high end the same. So you get great deals on high-end stuff, but the low-end stuff is overpriced, and that creates a lot of the waste.”
Pricing low- and high-end product more appropriately will likely help avoid excess waste ending up in landfills, Cooper said. That’s where the AI-guided pricing comes in. “We’re looking at historical prices, a measure of success, and then creating some statistically significant averages to suggest new prices to our pricers as they send product through our warehouse,” she said.
The hope is that the tech can be applied to any single-item business like an art gallery, pawn shop or consignment store, Cooper said. For Cooper, who has a real estate investment background, Thrift for Good is a passion project. “It’s the first thing in my life that I’ve said ‘I think I can really make a change,’” she said. “I see a significant problem that I can begin to chip away at that’s really meaningful. And I thought, ‘If I could do one thing in my life, this would be it. This could make such a massive impact on the world, if I can be successful at it.’”
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