Thriftify wants to take high-street charity retail online

A few years ago, Rónán Ó’Dálaigh, Rahil Nazir and Timur Negru had an idea. They realised that there although there were plenty of charity shops on the streets of towns and cities across Ireland, there were very few of these shops operating online, and so set about developing  Thriftify .
“We want to take one of the last legacy bricks-and-mortar retail sectors online and, in doing so, connect charity shops and other ethical retailers with conscious consumers,” Emily Beere, chief strategy officer of Thriftify, told Siliconrepublic.com.
Prior to joining Thriftify, Beere worked in PR, marketing and sales in Ireland, as well as San Francisco, Austin and New York. In these roles, she was responsible for finding suitable start-ups for investment for a tech fund, which gave her an “invaluable insight” into the world of entrepreneurship.
The market
Beere said that there is a growing market for sustainable, second-hand clothing products. In 2018, that market was valued at $24bn in the US by retail analytics firm GlobalData.
“The largest source of used fashion is charity retail – each year, 12,000 charity shops in the UK and Ireland receive over 150m individual donations, including books, clothing, furniture, CDs, DVDs and more,” Beere said. “Charities are restricted in their sales channels to effectively commercialise this volume of donations. Because of this, they end up paying for the disposal of valuable items.”
Thriftify wants to help charity retailers tap into an online sales channel. Its platform allows retailers to upload items from their stores, which can then be valued using a pricing algorithm and presented to e-commerce customers.
“Our CEO, Rónán Ó’Dálaigh, is the brains behind the venture,” Beere added. “He’s already a successful entrepreneur, having established an event management business previously. The original idea for Thriftify actually came from a project he did in university.
“He managed to find a book he needed for €1 in a charity shop, instead of €60, and it got him thinking about the arbitrage that exists in the charity retail sector. He took 1,000 books from NCBI and manually searched Amazon to see what they would have made online – the results are why we are here today.”
The technology
The Dublin-based social enterprise was launched in 2018. Along with Ó’Dálaigh, Beere said the company’s COO, Negru, is the “guy who keeps everything running”, while the man behind Thriftify’s e-commerce platform is CTO Nazir.
The platform users a variety of e-commerce tools on top of the intelligent pricing algorithm, including inventory management, integrated fulfilment and analytics, and reporting features.
“I’m not the tech wizard so I won’t get into any specifics, but the key to why we have been successful so far is that all the features are hidden behind an extremely easy-to-use and intuitive dashboard that even the most...