4 Dec 2025 Community

A Year of Resilience, Innovation and Community: The Kirkwood’s Retail Story in 2025

The Kirkwood’s retail network stretching across shops in towns and villages throughout Kirklees, alongside its ever growing eBay operation at Sands Mill in Mirfield has experienced a year that tested, strengthened and reshaped the organisation’s approach to charity retail. Against a backdrop of national economic strain and shifting customer behaviours, The Kirkwood’s teams have continued to deliver growth, creativity and vital income for the charity’s care services.

On reflecting of the past 12 months, Paul Freethy, Head of Retail for The Kirkwood, offers a candid and detailed look at what 2025 has meant for the organisation. His insights show not only the challenges faced, but the extraordinary resilience and innovation of staff and volunteers who keep The Kirkwood’s retail heart beating strong.

Paul opens with an honest assessment of the wider charity retail environment.He said: “It’s a strange time in the retail world, really. Charity retail over a number of years has just grown and grown and grown. And it sort of reached a bit of a plateau, I guess, because everybody is going through tough times out there. The growth has slowed a bit now.”

Despite this, The Kirkwood’s network of shops has continued to show resilience: “Here at this charity our shops have grown year on year over the last three to four years and that has continued, but the pace of growth has been a little bit slower this year,” Paul explains. He emphasises that this is no reflection on the effort of the staff and volunteers: “They’re not doing anything differently. If anything, they’re doing things better and better every year. It’s just a really tough trading climate.”

Still, there are success stories, Paul continued: “We’ve got a few shops that are significantly up on previous years, and they’re probably the shops where The Kirkwood brand is at its strongest. We’ve invested some money in making those shops look really good and getting the message of what we do as a charity across.”

A key theme of 2025 has been customer behaviour: “I think customers have got really, really price savvy. You see customers going into the shops now with their phones out, googling the prices and stuff.”

That shift has forced a new level of responsiveness: “The trend of the year has been we've had to be really receptive to price points. One of our responsibilities to people who donate stock to us is to maximise the amount of money we get for the charity, but then the likes of the cheap import companies actually they're sometimes cheaper now than a charity shop.”

To adapt, Paul has led the rollout of new technology across the shops: “We’ve started to use AI ourselves, mainly in our eBay online operation, but we’re also rolling that out to the shops now,” he explains.

The new system isn’t generic: “What we’re rolling out is a glorified version of Google Lens, slightly more region specific. The piece of software will tell us what the price of a lady’s jacket in West Yorkshire raises rather than what it raises nationally.”

For Paul, this all reinforces The Kirkwood’s long standing philosophy: “I think our focus will be on the needs of our local community. It sort of always has been, but even more so.”

One of the defining pillars of The Kirkwood’s retail success is its refusal to standardise shops: “We want to retain the individuality of a shop. I don’t want all the shops to look the same.”

He contrasts The Kirkwood with other charities: “The charity retail chains that do all look the same. I’ll be honest with you, if I’m doing a round of visits, I’ll go in one and I know I don’t need to go in the others because they’re all going to look the same.”

For him, the charm of each location is essential: “What makes The Kirkwood retail special, it’s that difference in each shop. The spiral staircase in Cleckheaton, that’s probably my favourite feature. It was the first shop I visited when I first joined The Kirkwood. I thought, ‘Oh wow, what a building, what a feature.’”

Looking ahead, Paul wants to protect that uniqueness: “We're currently looking at a couple of refurbishments and a potential new shop and we may use different shop fitters for every one. And that will bring its own uniqueness to each situation because it’s different people doing it for us.”

Having worked at national, regional and local levels, Paul knows how widely communities can vary: “It still surprises me,” he says. “It’s not just a difference between Altrincham in Manchester and Bolton. The nuances even within a smaller area are still just the same. The pricing in Cleckheaton or Mirfield won’t be the same as the pricing in Holmfirth or Slaithwaite. So it's another thing that makes us unique.”

One of the biggest turnarounds this year has come from Sands Mill: “If you go back 12 months, we struggled a little bit with eBay,” Paul admits. “Partly we were struggling for some volunteer support. Corporate volunteer support from the Business Movement members has made a huge difference. eBay has massively outperformed its budgets this year.”

Every visit brings new activity: “The hub we have here at Sands Mill now, I’m surprised each time I visit, there's different people around all the time doing different stuff.”

The site has also become the centrepiece of modernisation: “We’ve been trying to get the Gift Aid digitalised modernised. Gift Aid makes such a difference, it’s 25% on top of every sale of gift aided stock we make.”

Looking ahead, a major new initiative is finally ready to progress: “One of the things we’re looking to introduce going forward next year is the retail loyalty card,” Paul confirms.

It’s been planned for years, but technology held it back: “We’ve been hamstrung a little bit by the technology not quite being able to deliver exactly what we wanted it to do, but it’s caught up with us now.”

And it matters because Gift Aid isn’t accessible to everyone: “There’s a lot of our community that, through no fault of their own, aren’t able to Gift Aid, but they’re just as loyal supporters as the Gift Aid supporters. So we’d like to be able to reward them as well.”

The festive season has brought a welcome lift: “They always say the quarter of October, November, December, it’s always referred to in charity retail as the golden quarter,” Paul says. Beyond the financial impact, it’s a chance for creativity: “It’s the time that the shops have a bit of fun. It allows their creativity to shine through with the displays.”

He’s been especially impressed this year: “I’ve seen some incredible window displays already. Lindley’s display really caught my eye, Huddersfield’s looked fab too as did all the shops.”

Paul ends the year with heartfelt gratitude: “A massive thank you to the volunteers and the paid staff. We can never do it without your loyal support. It’s been a fantastic effort, it always is.”

Despite challenges felt across the organisation, Paul remains hopeful: “It’s been a tough time, especially for a lot of our clinical colleagues,” he reflects.

But he sees opportunities in change: “Every stone gets looked at to see whether we’re doing the right things and whether we can do things slightly differently.”

Retail continues to be a critical part of The Kirkwood’s future: “It’s a profitable part of the organisation and that contribution to care doesn’t go unnoticed. My wish for the New Year is that we get some new opportunities over the line and keep growing because it's helping to raise those vital funds to care for those living with life limiting illnesses that matter.” 

We would like to thank all of our retail staff and volunteers for all their hard work in 2025!