The Good Shop offers solutions regarding employment, education and environment

The Good Shop is a social enterprise created in 2018 to offer solutions regarding employment, education and environment, through second-hand shops, Repair services and Upcycling activities. They follow the triple line model which seeks to impact the planet and the people, not just profit; and provide dignity and quality of life to people and communities.

The Good Shop also acts as a circular economy enabler to other local entrepreneurs, indeed finding themselves with a surplus of leftover fabrics, they decided to sort it out and offer it for a low cost to other entrepreneurs as a sustainable sourcing solution. They also became a solution providers to other enterprises by adding some of these industries’ leftovers in the products they would upcycle.

Hence The Good Shop could also act as a recipient of material from Hotel, as well as a provider of, for example, unique upcycled furniture to Hotels that could decorate spaces or guest rooms.

After 4 years of existence, they now have 3 physical shops in Mauritius (opened Monday to Saturday from 9:00-5:00), 2 workshops, and 1 online shop: https://thegoodshop.eshops.mu/

Thanks to the donations of the community and through the sales of second hand, repaired and renewed items; The Good Shop has enabled the funding of education for children from disadvantaged background, as well as the employment of people facing barriers to employment, such as people with a handicap or with a background of addiction. Second-hand shops, in their very concepts, help reduce waste by extending the life of goods and therefore impact the environment in a positive way. Donations are also distributed to partner NGOs, helping to support them in their fund-raising to finance their mission, or to help directly their beneficiaries.

REPAIR by The Good Shop & RENEW by The Good Shop were launched to further their commitment in providing solutions to environmental degradation through their workshops. This allows for disruption of the linear economy of “purchase-use-dispose”, and helped The Good Shop become circular as they repaired and renewed the textile and furniture donations that needed such, before selling them again in their shops, hence successfully giving a 2nd life to even more items. The Good Shop is constantly looking for innovative solutions for the items that cannot be sold through their shops or cannot be given to the NGOs, as a way to becoming fully zero waste.

This helps reduce the amount of furniture and textile waste that would have otherwise ended up in the landfill, while creating local employment. It is their wish to move away from the „fast fashion‟ and „fast furniture‟ trends toward more sustainable solutions.

You can therefore find in every Good Shops not only second hand items, but also unique upcycled and repaired furniture pieces, repaired textile pieces and an emerging line of upcycled „renewed‟ clothing.

The „renewed‟ clothing line seeks to design new creative and fashionable pieces of clothes from items that would have otherwise been discarded, such as old men’s shirts turned into baby clothes.

They do not only wish to become circular in their process, but to also encourage general awareness of the current environmental situation to the community. With this in mind, “Repair Stations” were launched in the shops as a convenient service for customers to repair their textile items: customers drop their textile items for The Good Shop to repair in under a week’s time, and come to pick it up again in the shop closest to them! They also achieve this by organizing workshops, with the collaboration of local artisans, where the public can learn how to repair their items. You can support The Good Shop’s missions of employment, education and environment – through your donations of objects, furniture or textile items, as well as through your shopping in any of the three shops and eshop – and help make a difference, just as stated by the tagline: “give, shop, change lives”.

The Good Shop has won the Sustainable Tourism Mauritius Gold Award in 2022 in the category Handicraft & Local Product.

We hope the tourism industry will find many fruitful ways to collaborate with this pioneer of making the circular economy not only real on Mauritius but also beautiful!

Victoria Desvaux
Collaboration and Sustainability lead
victoria.fauve@thegoodshop.mu