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Lucy and Yak is reportedly set to expand its high street presence through the opening of four new stores this year, according to Drapers.
The brand, best known for its overalls and jumpsuits, currently has five stores in Brighton, Norwich, Bristol, Nottingham and Cambridge.
It is now looking to further expand its estate with a new opening in Manchester’s Northern Quarter this June, as well as additional stores in Liverpool, Cardiff and Exeter.
The business was started as an e-commerce brand in 2017, and is known for its vintage-inspired dungarees, which are made from GOTS-certified organic cotton sourced from India. It has since expanded into other womenswear categories, including Lenzing Ecovero and flax linen shirts, organic cotton loungewear as well as outerwear made from deadstock cotton and recycled plastic bottles.
CEO Chris Renwick told Drapers: “The future of retail is omnichannel – online and in the stores. There’s a lot of talk of the high street dying. It swings back and forth but the reality is that you’re going to have to have both [ecommerce and in-store retail].”
The expansion will reportedly help Lucy and Yak expand its Re:Yak in-store clothing buyback scheme, which Renwick said is “difficult to do online”.
This was previously limited to Beyond Retro vintage clothing stores, but the Re:Yak programme expanded to its own stores on 23 January 2023, allowing customers to return their worn products in exchange for a £20 Lucy and Yak voucher valid on purchases over £50.
Renwick added: “No one wants to take ownership of [the life of a clothing product] – you’ve got the government, the business and the customer all pointing a finger [at each other], saying ‘you’re the person who should deal with the lifecycle of the product’.
“And I said: ‘Why don’t we just do it?’ You bring it back in, we’ll give you this amount of money, regardless of what the quality is. If we can resell it – brilliant. If not, we’ll recycle it and make sure it doesn’t go into landfill – and that’s working really well. We don’t offer it online at the minute but we do in the shops and customers are absolutely loving it.”
