The NCBI Charity Shops Brand
Bye–Bye Mrs Quins Now Buy NCBI!
Today, NCBI has 68 charity shops in major towns throughout Ireland which trade under the name of “Mrs Quins”. As part of NCBI’s corporate branding strategy, the name “Mrs Quins” will be dropped over the next several months as the shops re-brand to “NCBI” with a prominent indication to the public that the trading from these premises supports the services provided by NCBI. We asked Des Kenny NCBI’s CEO to explain this strategic change for NCBI shops.
On Thursday April 14th NCBI invited all the staff and management of its Mrs Quins Charity Shops to a meeting in the Croke Park Conference Centre to explain why it was changing the brand name of the shops to NCBI. The reasons behind the change and the need to now use the NCBI brand to focus the shops’ place and contribution within the NCBI organisation was outlined to the meeting by NCBI’s CEO Des Kenny. He explained to NCBI News the rationale and need behind the decision.
“The return to the NCBI brand for the shops is a logical one and enables us to inform customers and the general public who we are and what we do; and more importantly, how our NCBI shops fit into our organisation. Apart from the new branding of NCBI shops, the interiors of all shops will also be revamped over a slightly longer time frame and display regular reminders to the public, in the form of posters and leaflets, that NCBI works for people with sight loss through the provision of a wide range of services.
The shops will now take on a broader range of activities. For example, a selected range of helpful items such as talking clocks and watches as well as colour-contrasting house-hold articles will be sold in the re-branded NCBI shops. The wide “Street presence“ of the NCBI Shops will compliment local and national NCBI fundraising events and these will be managed through the shops to a supporting public.
“People will continue to purchase from our shops because of the value they offer, and because of the friendliness of staff and volunteers” says Des Kenny. “What will change will be the perception that goods donated for re-sale are directly benefiting a national organisation working for people with sight loss.
It is the quality and the volume of re-sale donated goods which contributes most significantly to the income provided to NCBI from each shop. The quality of our donated goods has not been as good as it might have been had people been encouraged to form a loyalty with a caring agency, like NCBI, for the passing on of items from their wardrobes which might still hold some sentimental value for them,” he said.
How NCBI started its Charity shops
NCBI adopted the “charity shop” as a fundraising concept in 1994. In that year it opened two shops, one in Wexford and the other in Manor Street in Dublin. Charity shops had already been embraced by a number of Irish charities, particularly by Cerebral Palsy Ireland (now Enable Ireland) and the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. The St. Vincent de Paul shops fulfilled a dual function as depots from which the needy, on the presentation of a voucher from a local Conference of the Society, could obtain clothing and house-hold items, including second-hand furniture. The shops were also a form of revenue generation for the Society where members of the public bought-in to the imported UK tradition of rummaging in charity shops for those special pieces of apparel donated by a public emptying out their wardrobes.
Poverty and disadvantage
It was the association of clothing the needy from shops, like those of St. Vincent De Paul, that made NCBI fearful of putting its own brand name on the shops it opened. Blindness was perceived by NCBI’s board and management as still having associations in the mind of the public with poverty and disadvantage. NCBI didn’t want to re-enforce this mistaken perception by having its shops regarded as fulfilling a need to clothe the “poor blind”, like those of St. Vincent de Paul dressed the “poor poor”.
The shop opened in Wexford was called “The Lantern”, after the logo still in use by NCBI since its inception in 1931. The shop opened in Dublin was given the title of “Mrs Quin”. This name was adopted as a follow on from periodic second-hand shops which had been opened by Nannette Quin since the 1930’s. Nanette Quin each year did her tour of the auctioneers of Dublin in search of a demised premises which she could “borrow” from them for a month, from which she could sell clothing collected over the year from her friends and supporters of NCBI. Nanette called her second-hand boutique “The Little Shop”.
Why we used the brand “Mrs Quins”
It seemed that adopting “Mrs Quin” as the name for NCBI’s charity shops met the need to dissociate the revenue generating activity from the compounding of any misconceptions around the shops being places where needy people who were blind could have their wardrobes replenished. That rationale, of the time, for branding was over-simplistic and was, long-term, damaging to the maximising of income by also dissociating the activity of revenue generation from the end beneficiary of the trading of the shops – providing funding for the services provided by NCBI.
Why the NCBI brand makes sense for us on the street
Many organisations run charity shops in Ireland today. All the shops of the charities, with few exceptions, carry the name of the charity – for example, Enable Ireland, Oxfam and Sue Rider. Even the St. Vincent de Paul shops, of which there are in excess of 100, have taken on a new look and high street prominence which is a long way away from their more humble beginnings as depots for goods for the poor and needy.