Circular Fashion · Greenly Feature
Every jacket sold at Thrift for Good does two jobs at once: it stays out of landfill, and it funds a children's project somewhere else in the world. Marketing Manager Aina Medina-Baltazar on what it actually takes to make secondhand feel like a first choice.
A donated jacket at Thrift for Good doesn't just get resold. It gets a second life and, according to Marketing Manager Aina Medina-Baltazar, a second kind of impact entirely. Every dirham of profit from that sale goes toward children's health, education, and housing projects around the world, through Gulf for Good, Thrift for Good's UAE-registered non-profit partner.
The process starts the moment someone donates. Items go into Thrift for Good's stores, where the team assesses what can be given another life, good-quality pieces go straight to resale, while anything needing more attention gets repaired or upcycled through the organization's Sustainability Hub, which has become central to processing donations and building capacity locally.
"A Thrift for Good store isn't really just a shop. It's a meeting point between people who have something to give and people looking for something different. Between fashion and waste reduction. Between a Dubai wardrobe and a child thousands of kilometres away."
Aina Medina-Baltazar, Marketing Manager, Thrift for Good
Funding follows specific, approved projects rather than a general fund, and accountability is treated as non-negotiable. Medina-Baltazar was direct about this: simply sending money somewhere doesn't make it impactful, there needs to be transparency around where it goes and what it achieves. The work has funded everything from classrooms and school facilities in Uganda and Nepal to education and nutrition programmes in Ethiopia, Bhutan, and Malawi.
I asked what's been hardest about getting people to choose secondhand over new. The answer wasn't logistics, it was language.
Thrift for Good is trying to shift how people talk about preloved clothing, from "used," which implies less-than, to "reused," which implies a deliberate, responsible choice. In a city like Dubai, where access to new fashion is enormous and consumption is deeply embedded in the culture, the team isn't asking people to stop buying new outright. They're reframing the question: before buying something new, could something that already exists work just as well?
There's a supply-side version of the same problem too. Not every donation is automatically useful, condition and quality matter, and improving what comes through the door matters as much as increasing how much of it there is.
From an online shop launched during COVID to four physical stores across Dubai, Thrift for Good's next chapter is Abu Dhabi, where its first store is opening soon. But growth, in Medina-Baltazar's telling, isn't really the point.
"We don't just want someone to think, 'I'll donate this to Thrift for Good.' We want the bigger behaviour change to become: before I throw this away, can it have another life? Before I buy new, can I buy preloved?"
Aina Medina-Baltazar, Marketing Manager, Thrift for Good
About Thrift for Good
Thrift for Good operates four secondhand clothing stores across Dubai, with 100% of profits supporting Gulf for Good's international children's projects. Learn more at aina@thriftforgood.org.