Give Your Best: A ‘Vinted for good’ which gives choice to people in need

New items getting snapped up within minutes of being uploaded to a secondhand clothing exchange sounds like a perfect situation. But not for Sol Escobar, founder and CEO of social enterprise Give Your Best. 

Escobar [pictured] created the platform as a tool to distribute donated garments to people in clothing poverty. So the speed at which items are snapped up – often within 24 hours – serves as evidence of the scale of the UK’s clothing poverty problem. 

“If I upload 10 items, by the time I’m uploading the last one, the first five have been shopped already,” she says. 

Alongside the online platform, Give Your Best runs a store in Islington, London, where customers can buy donated clothing, with the proceeds from sales used to enable those in need to shop there for free. 

But the shop reveals the other end of the spectrum of the UK’s clothing problem: the vast quantities of fashion waste the country generates each year, which experts tie inextricably with environmentally unsustainable shopping habits. 

If I upload 10 items, by the time I'm uploading the last one, the first five have been shopped already

“We’re sitting on enough clothes to open three shops,” says Escobar, which means she is seeking to expand Give Your Best to meet increasing demand, alongside dealing with more donations than its existing infrastructure can distribute.

On top of that, Give Your Best faces the imminent end of its lease on its shop, all while managing partnerships with the likes of magazine Vogue and running fashion shows. 

So perhaps it’s not a surprise Escobar feels like she’s “always playing catch up”. But now, thanks to support from the Cambridge Social Innovation Prize and a potential organisational restructure, she says Give Your Best is in a great position to take the next step. 

Widespread clothing poverty and egregious fashion waste

Escobar argues clothing poverty is an overlooked societal problem. Perhaps indicative of this is a lack of up-to-date research, with many campaigners and reports on the topic relying on figures from a study published in 2013, which found 5.5m adults (or 13% of the UK population) are unable to afford essential clothing.

Meanwhile, the Clothing Collective, a charity which provides gift cards that people in need can exchange for clothes in its partner charity shops, criticised the government’s Child Poverty Strategy, published in December 2025, for a lack of explicit focus on clothing as a basic right or guaranteed provision.

Escobar says: “There is such a big proportion of the population experiencing food poverty, and that is spoken about so much, obviously for good reason. But the same number of people experiencing food poverty are experiencing clothing poverty, because the last thing that they’re going to be thinking about is buying clothing if they can’t afford food.”

We could be dressing every single person who needs it several times over with the perfectly good clothes that end up in landfill

At the other end of the scale, there is sweeping evidence of egregious fashion waste across the UK. Research by the National Lottery Community Fund published in 2025 found nearly one in three adults (32%) had thrown away brand new clothes in the previous year, totalling an estimated 1.4bn items of clothing.

The Salvation Army Trading Company – the largest operator of textile banks in the UK – has reported an unmanageable surge in clothing donations in recent years. Clothing donated to charities in the global north which they are unable to distribute often ends up as landfill in the global south. 

“​​We could be dressing every single person who needs it several times over with the perfectly good clothes that end up in landfill,” says Escobar.

‘Vinted for good’

Give Your Best's online platform enables people to donate clothes which can then be shopped for free by those in need.

Escobar founded Give Your Best in 2020 to tackle both clothing poverty and fashion waste, with the social enterprise originally focusing on the peer-to-peer clothing donation platform, or “Vinted for good” as Escobar explains. 

What started as a private Instagram page during the Covid-19 pandemic grew rapidly, and Give Your Best now has more than 5,000 people accessing donated clothes through its platform. Escobar explains the platform has been co-designed with its users, to be deliberately data-light and accessible without having to own the latest phones or devices. 

From previous charity volunteering experience Escobar knew giving choice to people in need could be extremely empowering. “Volunteering in camps in Calais, one of the things that we were always told before going out to distribute food was always ask the person what they want to eat. It might be the only choice that they get to make that day, and that’s really important for agency,” she explains. 

It might be the only choice that they get to make that day, and that's really important for agency

In founding Give Your Best, Escobar wanted to ensure it delivered that sense of agency to the people it supports, which is why it has recreated the experience of clothes shopping rather than receiving donations for the people using the platform as well as the Islington store. 

The Islington store was opened as a pop-up in June 2024, and it became permanent following its successful launch. As well as the pay it forwards shopping system, the shop is used as a space for clothing repair and upcycling workshops run by refugees. 

But the lease on the store ends later this year and now Give Your Best is looking for a new site just to ensure it can maintain its existing pay it forwards service, as well as other new sites for further expansion. 

Rates relief and organisational restructures

Sol Escobar is using money won from the Cambridge Social Innovation Prize to develop her fundraising skills and develop a fundraising strategy for Give Your Best.

In 2025 Escobar was one of four winners of the Cambridge Social Innovation Prize. The prize includes a £10,000 award for personal and professional development. She has used the prize money to complete courses on fundraising with the School for Social Entrepreneurs, as well as work with a consultant on a fundraising strategy for Give Your Best. 
 

Escobar says: “I feel like, as a founder, we are always doing everything in every department. I didn’t have any specific training in fundraising, I was just trying to figure it out myself.” 

Work on the fundraising strategy has led to a board-level discussion about changing the organisation’s legal structure. Currently a Community Interest Company (CIC), Give Your Best is considering restructuring into a registered charity, partly because of its plans to expand the retail side of the organisation. 

“There is already a whole infrastructure dedicated to charity shops, and even though ours is not quite that because we give away clothes via our shop, we can attach ourselves to that infrastructure, and it’s going to make it a lot easier for us to find a space, to have rates relief, that sort of thing,” Escobar explains. 

High fashion and aiming high in 2026

Give Your Best's 2023 fashion show took place in Cambridge's Grand Arcade.

2025 was a landmark year for Give Your Best, and not just because Escobar won the Cambridge Social Innovation Prize. 

The year also saw Give Your Best launch a partnership with Vogue highlighting clothing poverty and hold a fashion show in the Trampery on the Gantry, Hackney Wick, London, featuring 20 refugees modelling clothes from emerging designers. 

Give Your Best also contributed to the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs’ Circular Economy Taskforce consultation. A Circular Economy Strategy for Englandis expected to be published this year. 

We are at a great point to open more shops, to seek more partnerships, to really take that next step in our growth

Escobar, who was highly commended in the WISE100 awards 2024 Social Business Star of the Future category, is now looking to build on this platform of success in 2026. 

“We are at such an important point for us where we have proven our business models, really strong frameworks, really robust partnerships, and we are at a great point to open more shops, to seek more partnerships, to really take that next step in our growth,” she says.

Images courtesy of Give Your Best
 

This content is brought to you by Pioneers Post in partnership with the Cambridge Social Innovation Prize, a collaboration between Cambridge Centre for Social Innovation and Trinity Hall.