It’s lots of fun, extremely eco-friendly, great value for money and you get to raise money for PoC at the same time. A Clothes-Swap Auction is really easy to organise, here is what you do:
- Find a free living room
- Invite a group friends, five or more is recommended, ideal size is probably around ten.
- Encourage everyone to have a sort through their wardrobes and bring along any unwanted clothes, shoes, bags, scarves or hats.
- On the evening after a drink and some nibbles invite your guests to have a rummage through the donated clothes and allocate an area/adjacent room with a mirror to try things on.
- Create a new pile of all the items that poeple are interested in bidding on.
- Nominate someone as the auctioneer and another as the assistant to note down the bids.
- One by one the auctioneer picks items from the new pile for guests to bid on. Guideline amounts are: all t-shirts, tops, shirts and skirts start at £1, jeans and dresses start at £3 and coats or expensive items start at £5. Then all bids go up in increments of 50p. The auctioneer’s assistant notes down who won each item and keeps a running total for each guests.
- At the end of the evening guests settle their account and any of the clothes that were not bid on can be reclaimed by the owners, donated to a charity shop or kept for a subsequent auction in the future.
Here is photo from a clothes auction hosted by PoC supporter Julie Ogier. The evening was an enormous success and raised £250 for PoC and each of the guests went home with at least eight new items of clothing!
If you’d like to host your own clothes auction and need any help or advice please contact us in the office.