Poland’s Quintessential Small Business, Under Threat

The ubiquitous secondhand stores are being squeezed by modern shopping malls on the one hand and “exchange markets” on the other.

by Martin Ehl 17 January 2012

The big, burly guy looked extremely happy. In his hand he held two jackets, one of them guaranteed to be leather, and headed to the checkout line. He hollered over to his girlfriend or wife on the other side of the shopping hall that he had already made his choices so she better hurry up with hers.

 

That scene came to mind when I read an article recently from the Slovak SME daily about secondhand clothing stores, which – as I understood from the article – are booming in Slovakia as people try to save during the economic crisis. At the same time, some of them are suspected of reselling clothes that people in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, or elsewhere in Europe have donated to charities in the belief that the clothes would serve the poor in, for example, Africa.

 

I witnessed that introductory scene on Marshal Street, in the heart of Warsaw. In one of the shopping centers there, it’s possible to procure primarily English sweaters, pants, jackets, shirts, shirts, handbags – whatever you can imagine – for ridiculously low prices. Most of the goods still had the original tags so it wasn’t technically a secondhand store. But it was a sufficient impulse to ponder a bit over “secondhand” as some kind of phenomenon – and one particularly Polish.

 

Poland has made every effort to improve its image from the later years of socialism as a poor country full of small traders. But it is just that restless business spirit that led to the growth of an entrepreneurial subculture of small and large dealers in used clothing who import goods, mainly from England and by the ton. There are around 25,000 such businesses.  

 

“The market is already full – today you can’t just begin with a small shop in a housing estate,” the owner of one of the smaller chains importing “fresh” goods from the United Kingdom complained to the Gazeta Prawna newspaper back in 2009. Around that time, the discussion in Poland’s online forums about secondhand stores was culminating, with various people giving advice about how to get started in the business and succeed. 

 

Used clothing stores are on every corner in Poland and no one is ashamed to shop there, neither rich nor poor. Hundreds of companies import clothes, including an estimated 100,000 tons annually of the used variety. When you search on Google using the Polish words for secondhand clothing, you get 3.5 million results, with the pages of several hundred companies at the top of the list. The main source country is England, but Sweden and the Netherlands also figure heavily. German goods are evidently not very popular, because the Germans give away their clothes and shoes in too worn a state.

 

Thanks to a more rapacious form of capitalism than we have here in the Czech Republic, Polish society is highly stratified, and for many people super cheap, used garments, often sold to the end customer “by the kilo,” are the only source of clothes – if these people aren’t directly dependent on charity. But at the same time Poland is growing richer and building one large shopping center after another. Dozens of Polish textile, clothing, or footwear firms are able to withstand the cheap Chinese and expensive French and Italian competition. People don’t know or perhaps don’t want to know, but many well-known brands – such as Reserved, Tatoom, and Vistula – are actually Polish.

 

For example, some companies from Bialystok – the largest city in northeastern Poland, and the traditional center of lingerie manufacture – sew for the most renowned European brands or themselves penetrate the most demanding of markets. “We have a store in Moscow and it’s going great,” the owner of the Kinga company in Bialystok told me after I asked her where it’s the most difficult for her to succeed. She had just returned with a contract from a trade fair in Paris.

 

Just two years ago the Polityka weekly ran an article about how everything is imported to Poland from the West – from clothing and refrigerators to cars. But with the Poles becoming wealthier and until now eluding the financial crisis, they are yearning to improve their standards.

 

And because the Poles are also businessmen, they are constantly counting this or that – “combining,” as they say in Polish, or “mixing and matching,” as we might say in English. A new phenomenon that Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper recently noted is bazaars where mothers, especially, exchange – but don’t sell – children’s clothing and other items. Thousands of people in Poznan, Torun, and Warsaw are already taking part in such activities.

 

“These exchange markets are already competition for secondhand clothing shops, which aren’t even that cheap anymore,” one regular participant told the paper’s correspondent.

 

So it’s not only cheap shopping malls threatening the omnipresent secondhand shops, but a new trend that provides clothes for free. It’s hard to beat that.