Fashion roundabout

Looking good without costing the earth

A love of fashion and an eye for a bargain led Coco and Alice to come up with an eco-friendly way of keeping clothes in use, as Susan Coulson finds out.

The fashion industry has been under fire in recent years for its lack of sustainability and poor employment practices.

Tonnes of fast fashion clothes - cheap to buy and quickly discarded - end up in landfill.

So how do you look good without costing the earth? Try taking a trip to Coco and Alice, a shop in Chatton specialising in ‘pre-loved and nearly new fashion finds’.

Tucked away above the Chatton Village store, it’s packed with good quality clothes and accessories in every size and style. It appeals to those looking for a bargain but also Coco and Alice

wanting to shop more ethically.

Coco Oates and Alice Landale have been friends for years and always shared clothes, especially for special occasions. They enjoyed running a pop-up charity shop for the PTA in Wooler and joked about having their own shop one day.

When they started thinking about selling second-hand clothes, their initial idea was to have pop-up sales. Coco explains: “We set up a Facebook group and an Instagram account and we just invited people to come to my house. So it was friends and friends of friends.” Alice adds: ‘Which was kind of what we envisaged it being, almost like a

club to exchange dresses and occasion wear really.”

Chatton Village Store (co-owned by Alice’s sister-in-law) had an empty room upstairs, where Alice and Coco initially planned to store all the clothes and post pictures and videos on social media. But people started calling in. “Before long it had become a shop! So we needed to start smartening it up and making it into a proper shop,” says Alice.

A fitting bit of history is that the upstairs room is known as The Old Tailor’s Room and was once a tailor’s shop, built in 1913 for J Colville & Sons, who employed 12 tailors and whose customers included the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland.

Despite little formal marketing, word has spread. As well as local customers, the shop now gets visitors from all over the Borders, Edinburgh, Newcastle and even as far away as the west coast of Scotland.

“It’s exceeded our expectations,” says Coco, “but people like to come here, then go to the pub and have lunch, buy coffee and things downstairs in the shop and so on – so it’s become a bit of a day out.”

There is everything from jeans and shirts to cashmere jumpers and mother-of-the-bride outfits, and Alice and Coco are keen to give people honest advice about what suits them, which is much appreciated by many of their customers.

When an item sells, the price is divided 50/50 with the seller. Everything is good quality and anything that isn’t sold is usually given to local charities.

Before lockdown, the shop opened two days a week, but since mid June, they are opening by appointment only and can be contacted via their Facebook page where they post photos of what’s available. Customers can also get in touch about particular items they are looking for and receive photos of what is in stock. Anything they choose can then be parcelled up and posted.

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