Meadowhall supports YWCA Yorkshire charity shop with a transformational makeover

Retail specialists from Meadowhall’s management team have supported YWCA Yorkshire with a makeover of their Sheffield-based charity shop.

Using their retail experience, the team spent a day reorganising the store to improve the customer experience and creating an eye-catching window display to help encourage more customers into the store.

Meadowhall has also donated £1.000 from its Community Fund to support with updates to the store’s essential retail equipment, including tills and signage.

The relationship grew after Sheffield Business Together contacted their network of businesses to seek support for YWCA Yorkshire's charity shop. Once a thriving small shop in Firth Park, recent trading years have seen a decline in donations and income. Committed to returning the shop to its former glory, the dedicated team of

volunteers and staff from YWCA Yorkshire reached out to Sheffield Business Together for help.

YWCA Yorkshire were introduced to three amazing women from the Meadowhall Management Team, with an impressive 72 years of retail experience between them - Ashlyn Miller, Business Support Manager, Lauren Palfreyman and Gail Finneran, both Retail Executives, shared their wealth of retail and visual merchandising experience, including customer psychology, curating the customer’s eye-line, building outfits, bestseller positioning and item zoning.

One hundred percent of the profits made by the charity shop are used to support women living at YWCA Yorkshire's homeless hostel, Peile House, in Pitsmoor, Sheffield. As well as being a central funding stream for this vital local service, the charity shop is a community hub for people living and working in Firth Park and it was this that motivated Meadowhall's Management Team to offer their support.

Claire Harding, Peile House Project Manager, said: “We honestly can’t believe the difference made in a day. Our charity shop is looking incredible, with clean lines, carefully organised stock, and a beautifully curated window display which is inviting and will hopefully pull in more passing trade. We learned so much from the visit and the vast retail experience of the women that gave up their time to support us. We honestly can’t thank them enough. We hope to see lots of new faces in the charity shop as word gets around, and we look forward to putting everything we’ve learnt into practice."

Ashlyn Miller said, “It was our pleasure to help YWCA in this way – it was brilliant to support Claire and the team in the store and share our retail knowledge. Supporting our local community is incredibly important to us and we hope the new layout and our donation will hopefully go some way to make a difference to the charity and those it supports.”

Sheffield Business Together connect likeminded businesses with local causes to address challenges facing Sheffield’s communities. Since launching in 2019, Sheffield Business Together have supported over 90 voluntary sector organisations and delivered 503 projects: with a value in excess of £1 million to the city and worked with over 26 schools supporting 16,000 young people last year. . Businesses and charities can connect with the team by emailing charlotte.hedges@scci.org.uk.

YWCA Charity Shop is located at 101 Sicey Ave, Sheffield, S5 0RH. Charity shop donations can be taken to the shop or to Peile House, 255 Pitsmoor Road, Sheffield, S3 9AQ.