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At Winmark—The Resale Company®, our franchisees can greatly impact their communities. By backing charities, supporting sustainability, and providing access to affordable and accessible yet high-quality shopping options, you can inspire positive change in individuals, families, and communities at large.
Motivation to Give Back
Owning a business can be fulfilling in its own right, but giving back to your neighbors and local environment is one of the greatest impacts you can have. Community engagement is at the core of our brands at Winmark, as creating relationships with neighbors and customers is essential for becoming part of the community and creating a loyal client base.
In addition to having community-oriented business models, the special-interest of our five resale brands– Plato's Closet®, Once Upon A Child®, Style Encore®, Music Go Round®, and Play It Again Sports® – create natural crossovers with certain kinds of charities. For example, many Play It Again Sports stores opt to sponsor local little teams while some Once Upon a Child franchisees donate to children’s shelters. As businesses with a vested interest in supporting the community as a whole, many Winmark brand stores will sponsor local events with their Chamber of Commerce and regularly connect with charitable organizations.
Addressing Community Needs
Our brands impact the local economy twofold by supplying affordable, high-quality goods and creating job opportunities. Each of our five brands caters to a specific community, whether it's young adults, professionals, parents, athletes, or music enthusiasts. This hyper-specialized focus enables franchisees to support the exact needs of a community. Franchisees and store associates can attest to the real impact that supplying affordable clothing, kid's items, sports equipment, and music products has in an area.
Small businesses are the backbone of any community. With Winmark, you can become a leader in your community and develop civic responsibility. Every Style Encore, Plato’s Closet, Once Upon a Child, Play It Again Sports and Music-Go-Round creates full and part-time jobs that support employees and their families. We take great care in equipping our franchisees with the resources they need to find managers who have an in-depth knowledge of the industry and care about the community the store serves.
Opening Doors for New Passions
One of the most rewarding outcomes of franchising with Winmark is seeing how the products that pass through a store can change people’s lives. By creating a space for people to purchase high-quality clothing at a more affordable price than other stores and sell their own items, Winmark brands make it easier for budget-conscious consumers to not only buy clothing but also exchange their own items. At Style Encore, Plato’s Closet, and Once Upon a Child, our products can be a part of a successful job interview, a confidence-boosting outfit at school, or a growing child’s ever-changing wardrobe.
Products from Play It Again Sports and Music-Go-Round can ignite a passion for athletics or the arts that might have otherwise been out of reach. Between uniforms, equipment and enrollment fees, playing organized sports can be cost-prohibitive for some families. By creating a more affordable place for athletes to purchase gently used sports equipment, a larger subset of the community can participate in enriching activities that might become a bigger part of their lives. Franchisees of Music-Go-Round often delight in watching young people playing an instrument for the first time and seeing their eyes light up when they think of their own potential just by owning an instrument. These items create meaning in people’s lives, giving franchisees the opportunity to deliver that value to people in their community.
Activating Sustainable Solutions
Our commitment to sustainability across Plato’s Closet, Play It Again Sports, Style Encore, Once Upon a Child, and Music-Go-Round has led to over 1.7 billion recycled items. While every community faces different challenges in sustainability efforts, Winmark brands support consumers all across North America who want to keep their clothes, sporting goods and musical equipment out of nearby landfills and in use for longer product lifespans, giving them an easier way to buy and sell used goods within their local communities without placing demands on wasteful textile production.
For example, making one cotton shirt from scratch requires 2,700 liters of fresh water. With approximately 2 billion people around the world lacking access to clean water, opting to purchase a resale shirt rather than a new one can greatly reduce water consumption. This gives consumers a powerful way to help cut down on pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. This concept is an important value that an ever-growing number of consumers share. When you franchise with Winmark, you can protect the planet and foster brand loyalty.
Being a franchisee with Winmark is incredibly rewarding for the relationships your team will build, the opportunities that affordable goods and a sustainable resale model will provide, and the nonprofit organizations that your store can help sustain and grow. Winmark brand stores often turn into neighborhood institutions, and as the years pass, your store's impact will only continue to grow. Being a business owner is a huge responsibility, but it will pay dividends on the environment and potentially change the lives of countless people in your area.
At Winmark, our retail resale franchises put the right infrastructure in place to empower community members to make small actions that add up to big change. Being at the helm of a Winmark brand store is an opportunity to give back to your community for generations. Contact us today to learn more about our franchise opportunities.