About Us
Our Story
Believe or not this company started when my 8 year old daughter asked me a simple question "Dad, what is going to happen with my sister's school uniforms when she is graduates primary school ?"I told her that as usual all her used school uniforms will be given to her to wear, she said "That's recycling". I told her she was absolutely correct and asked if she was okay with that and she told me recycling is cool and good for the environment. I was floored that someone so young knew the value of recycling and wanted to be a part of saving the planet. My eldest daughter told me that we should start a uniform recycling program for her primary school.
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The rest is history, we started to look at creating a uniform recycling program at their school and began to research clothing going to landfill and the amount is astronomical, as you might well know. As people who have bought second hand and recycled clothing pretty much their whole lives, we knew we needed to move our focus to not only school uniforms , but to all clothing and get the message out there!
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The Revolution began at that moment.
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Who are The Secondhand Sisters?
We are Rachel and Doug, two best buddies drawn together through a love of travel, a love for the planet, and a desire to make things better for our local and global community.
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Rachel Kerr-Mackey
Co-Founder
Rachel is a big traveller, having kids on the other side of the planet and as a result has embraced the less is more sustainable lifestyle. Living as an urban nomad, the importance of reusing and recycling is part of her everyday life. She is our sourcing queen, and loves to curate the perfect look. Rachel loves collecting all things vintage, saving clothing and textiles from landfill, ocean swimming and curling up with a good book.
Douglas Snider
Co-Founder
Doug travelled the world with only a backpack for 7 years, learning the importance of sustainable living before it was even a thing, before falling in love with Sydney. Doug is our numbers and tech guy- all that back office stuff, in addition to all the other bits and pieces he does. His latest project is Furoshiki, using old clothes for traditional Japanese cloth wrapping used to transport clothes, gifts, or other goods.
Our Vision
We are here to inspire a generation to think secondhand first not second best. Our ultimate goal is to reduce rising textile waste and to challenge the endless search for the latest fast fashion look through our circular economy e-shop.
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We are one of Australia's first social enterprise online second hand clothing stores for men, women, children, and everyone in between.
We want to assist Australians to responsibly re-home and re-use their unwanted and no longer needed fashion items, while helping out the planet and giving to our charity partners in our local community.
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Join the revolution.
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We want more people to realise that you don't need to always buy new clothes. At the Secondhand Sisters we want to offer a better platform to shop for secondhand clothes. We make it a seamless and simple process to find what you need, and give back at the same time.
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We want to reduce the amount of landfill caused by fast fashion. Reduce the cost of buying clothes and help the most vulnerable members of our society.
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The choices you make can influence and empower not only you, but your community and the planet. Make it your own revolution.
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We are a social enterprise which means that our business is committed to giving back to communities.
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Rachel Kerr-Mackey
Co-Founder
What is fast fashion?
Fast fashion can be defined as trendy, cheap clothing produced rapidly by mass-market retailers in response to the latest trends. Fast fashion became common because of cheaper clothing, an increase in the appetite for fashionable clothing, and the increase in purchasing power on the part of consumers.
Suddenly everyone could afford the latest cat walk trends and dress like their favorite rockstar or celebrity. But it was all too good to last, and we started to see fast fashion's devastating dark side.
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What is the circular economy?
The earth's resources are not limitless. we need to move beyond a take, make, and disposable economy towards one where all resources are treated as precious.
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A circular economy is an economic system aimed at eliminating waste and the continual reuse of resources.
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We must transform all the elements of the take-make-waste system: how we manage resources, how we make and use products, and what we do with the materials afterwards. Only then can we create a thriving economy that can benefit everyone within the limits of our planet.
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Fast fashion's impact on our planet is massive! The industry is the second largest polluter in the world after oil and gas. There is the environmental impact of fast fashion- which is the pollution of our waterways, use of pesticides, and enormous quantities of water. There is also the human cost of fast fashion- garment workers, mainly women and children working in dangerous conditions, for low wages, and without basic human rights. This was brought to the world's attention in 2013 when the Rana Plaza clothing complex in Bangladesh collapsed, killing over a 1000 workers.
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In Australia alone we purchase 28 kg of clothing each year per person. We throw 23 kg of that into landfill every year. To imagine what it looks like is impossible so try this, an Olympic swimming pool can hold about 1 million kgs, so we would need 575 pools just to hold all the clothes we throw out annually.
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Australians are the second largest consumers of fast fashion in the world.
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Let's make choices that matter, to us, to the planet.​
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So it's time for a recycle revolution! Remember the saying "you are what you wear" we want to change that saying to " you are what you don't wear". We mean that what you don't wear and what you do with those unwanted clothes determines the type of person you are. Recycling feels good!
The Secondhand Sisters is the best way to shop for secondhand clothes with the smallest impact on the planet, your time and your wallet.
Our mission is to inspire a new generation of shoppers to think secondhand first. More people wearing secondhand means less waste. If everyone bought just one used item instead of a new item this year, we would save almost 12 billion kilograms of carbon. That's the equivalent of taking half a million cars off the road for a year. A whole year!
So get to it people! There are already enough awesome clothes on the planet.
So let's wear them.
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