24 May 2023
With their bright pink branding our 17 hospice shops are well-known and loved. They provide a connection back to the care Hospice provides and are integral to our fundraising efforts, bringing in just over a third of our funding needs each year.
This clever model of fundraising was developed in the early 1990s, with our first hospice shop opened in Takapuna on Huron St in 1991. Volunteers remember it as being one half of a larger shop, divided down the middle. It was owned by well-known local family and hospice supporters, the Galbraiths.
Margaret Broad, who was on the Hospice Management Committee, was the driving force behind its opening. “We had started talking about opening an ‘op shop’ but didn’t really know what one was,” she said. “So I rang the South Auckland Hospice, which had an op shop, to find out more. They told us to come down and have a chat about how they ran it.”
Margaret left that meeting with a station wagon full of clothes, kindly gifted by the South Auckland hospice shop volunteers. “And then as people started to hear about the shop, clothes just kept pouring in,” she said. “Then we found out we could get a shop on Huron St in Takapuna.”
The volunteers' “biggest worry” was whether they’d make enough money to pay their first week’s rent, Margaret recalled. “But from the very beginning it was very, very popular. We got a lot of customers, especially women looking for children’s clothes. We sold things very cheaply and it just went from there.”
The late Isobel Holdsworth was the manager of Hospice’s first shop, after earning herself the title of Mrs Material for her voluntary work selling fabric to raise money for Hospice.
“The material came from Jean Jones,” Isobel said in an earlier interview. “Mike Ward, who owned Jean Jones, was on Hospice's Management Committee and he kept us in supply.
“I used to load up the boot of my car and if I went anywhere there was a crowd I’d say, ‘Come and have a look.’”
Isobel’s car boot sales were so popular she was given a space at Hospice’s newly acquired Shea Tce site to sell the fabric from.
“It went from knit material to linens and silks and all sorts of things. I had a good gathering of friends that came in on different days to help me. And by then we were also starting to receive deceased estates.”
Isobel’s fabric sales morphed into garage sales held in the car park of Shea Tce. Volunteers sold everything from furniture to books, crockery and bric-a-brac and they were very successful, Isobel said. “The first time we made $10,000 we were very pleased with ourselves.” Eventually the garage sales made way for the Hospice shops, as we know them today. Following the success of the first shop in Takapuna, shops in Birkenhead and Browns Bay were opened. “And it went from there,” Isobel said.
We’re still reminded of the garage sales of yesteryear, though, in the “new breed” of garage sale that does so well in Warkworth, the Hospice Garage Sale Shop. For many, that will always offer a fond trip down memory lane.
