How secondhand clothes took Zimbabwe by storm – and hammered retail

Harare, Zimbabwe – Kimberley Dube takes great care with her appearance. She always looks sharp and fashionable in smart-looking jeans, t-shirts, sweatpants, tops, and designer sneakers.

“I love jeans – can’t get enough of them,” the 35-year-old says.

But while she may give the appearance of someone with money to spend on expensive apparel, the self-employed entrepreneur laughs when she says, “You are wrong! These clothes are inexpensive; I get them from secondhand clothes sellers.”

Dube, who lives in Harare, is just one of a multitude of Zimbabweans who have turned their backs on home-grown fashion brands, opting for the booming market in secondhand – or “pre-loved” – imports from overseas instead.

“There’s no shop in this country where you can pay as little as $2 for a pair of jeans,” she scoffs.

Dube is particularly drawn to the stylish individuality that buying second-hand clothes affords her. ”Most clothing stores carry mass-produced items, which you’ll see all over town; the stuff here is unique.”

“Here” is a small market next door to a suburban shopping centre in a middle-class neighbourhood, where we are perusing the wares. Dube’s equally trendy friend and fellow millennial, Gamuchirai Mpofu, a huge fan of preloved clothes, has also come along.

“The nice thing about shopping here is that though the clothes are used, they are durable, unlike the Chinese stuff sold in most shops,” she says. Both of them say buying used clothes gives them access to a variety of brands and items they can’t find in Zimbabwean shops. “It’s about uniqueness and individuality,” Mpofu says.

Clothes neatly displayed at a Harare suburban market [Ish Mafundikwa/Al Jazeera]

Winnie Mutsokoti, an effervescent seller at the market, welcomes us with a warm smile. She has four frame tents, each laid out like a section in a clothing store. We head straight to the one in which various styles and sizes of denim wear are neatly displayed on hangers. Some of the merchandise on offer here appears new or hardly worn.

”You will not find anything other than denim in this tent,” she explains. “It’s different from my other tents, where you can find dresses, jumpsuits, shorts, hoodies, jerseys, and other things.” Mutsokoti has been running her secondhand clothes import business for six years now.

Today, all of Mutsokoti’s winter stock is in the end-of-season sale as the weather gets warmer.

Some of her items have store labels and price tags on them. This happens when the clothes come from “broken” size ranges from retailers. A broken size range is a collection in which several sizes have sold out. The remaining items usually sell at a reduced price and end up in bales of used clothes destined for Africa.

Imported used clothing sold in Zimbabwe is, according to the authorities, brought into the country illegally through the porous borders or official border posts with the collusion of customs, immigration and law enforcement officials after it is brought off ships from Europe and North America.

While it is possible to apply for a licence to bring used clothes into the country for re-sale, nobody does this as it is expensive and the import duties are high.

Mutsokoti buys her stock from a “runner”, who in turn buys his stock in Zambia. She pays on delivery so she doesn’t risk losing her money if the runner gets arrested and the clothes are impounded. She pays anything from $150 to more than $250 for a bale of clothes, depending on the quality of the content. “One has a choice as the bales are graded and labelled accordingly.”

Denim galore at Winnie Mutsokoti’s stall in a suburb of Harare [Ish Mafundikwa]

Pile ‘em high, sell ‘em low

In another part of the city, the sprawling markets are busy in Mbare, a poorer, working-class neighbourhood and Harare’s oldest Black residential area, known as Harare African Township during colonial times.

Most of the houses in the oldest parts of Mbare have fallen into disrepair. The hostels, which were home to single men who worked in white-owned factories during colonial times and now house families, are in need of refurbishment or demolition, but nothing has been done about them yet.

In one of the markets here, spread out in a dusty open space between the hostels, business in secondhand clothing is brisk.

Most of the selling takes place in makeshift sheds covered with plastic sheeting, with some clothes laid out on tables or displayed on hangers. Mostly, sellers pile the clothes on plastic sheets on the ground.

Prosper Matenga, the owner of a pile of men’s and women’s clothing, keeps a close eye as prospective customers rummage through it, some of them trying on dresses out in the open. His prices range from $3 to $10 depending on what a customer wants to buy and its quality.

He tells Al Jazeera he has been trading in secondhand clothes, also imported via a runner from overseas, since 2018. “I couldn’t find a job, so I tried this. I am happy I did because I can look after my wife and child,” he says. Like Mutsokoti, his stock also comes from overseas.

Matenga says he makes more than a lot of people in formal employment. ”In the early days of winter, I sometimes made as much as $1,000 a day; now, it’s down to around $200, but I am not complaining; I love being my own boss.” By comparison, in Zimbabwe, civil servants earn about $350 a month.

The low overheads are also attractive: “I don’t pay the city council to sell here; I just pay the guy who cleans this space $2 per day and $20 per week for overnight storage.” He shrugs off the notion of paying any sort of vendor fee – mandatory for most legitimate businesses – to the city council with a smile. None of the street vendors selling from downtown Harare’s pavements, outside their homes or from the backs of their trucks or cars, pay a vendor fee.

Prices here are not dissimilar to Mutsokoti’s and those charged by other vendors in the more middle-class areas. However, the Mbare market generally offers more bargains and the emphasis is on durability rather than fashion. Shouts of “Dollar for two” ring across the market; some use bullhorns to attract the attention of potential customers.

Others have different priorities, however. Odera Moyo, in his late 20s, is shopping for clothes at the Mbare market today but draws a line at secondhand clothes for his child. “It’s OK for me and my wife to wear used clothes, but I’ll always buy new stuff for my baby boy,” he says.

Moyo completed high school nine years ago but has never been employed formally since then. “I’d love to have a salary, but jobs are difficult to find because of our country’s economic situation.”

Zimbabwe has been facing economic challenges, including high unemployment rates and inflation for more than 20 years, causing a cost of living crisis for many people. Moyo depends on odd menial jobs and sometimes buys clothing from the market when the prices fall in order to resell them on the street in areas where there are no secondhand clothes markets. “I watch the prices come down to sometimes a dollar for four items and then buy,” he explains.

T-shirts and polos on display at Mbare market in downtown Harare [Ish Mafundikwa]

Tough times for retailers

While consumers are clear winners due to the explosion of the secondhand foreign clothes market, the influx of used clothing sold at low prices has hit Zimbabwean clothing manufacturers and retailers.

Bekithemba Ndebele is chief executive officer of Truworths Zimbabwe, a clothes retail chain founded in 1957 when the country was still a British colony known as Rhodesia.

“We are competing against secondhand clothing that comes into the country without any duties paid and, unlike bricks-and-mortar retail operators, without the overhead costs like occupancy costs, rates, and rents because these people are trading off the street,” he tells Al Jazeera.

“If you compare the selling prices, the informal sector sells at less than the raw material cost – the fabric cost itself.”

While the dysfunctional economy has been a major factor in Truworths’s waning fortunes, Ndebele says the popularity of used clothing has been nothing short of a disaster for the chain, which has three distinct chain brands: Truworths Man, Truworths Ladies – both of which cater to the higher end of the market – and Number 1.

The latter mainly sold clothes in commercial farming areas before Zimbabwe’s fast-track land reform programme launched in 2000.

“We had to close dozens of branches since thousands of farm workers lost their jobs,” Ndebele says. From 53 branches at its peak, Number 1 is now down to a mere six. Over the years, Truworths has closed all but 34 of the 101 stores it operated in the late 1990s.

The difficulties also affected Truworths’s manufacturing division, Harare-based Bravette, which was forced to reduce its 250-person workforce to 80 to cut costs.

Issues such as high unemployment, mass emigration of skilled people to countries like South Africa, Botswana, Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom; hyperinflation; and Zimbabwe’s decades-long general economic malaise have also contributed to the industry’s downturn.

A few weeks after Al Jazeera interviewed Ndebele, Truworths filed for bankruptcy protection. He declined to speak to Al Jazeera again about the reasons for this.

People sell preloved and new cheap clothes on the pavement outside a Truworths branch in downtown Harare. Truworths said it could not compete with the secondhand imported clothes market [Ish Mafundikwa/Al Jazeera]

‘Sticking a bandage on a festering wound’

Currency instability has also been a significant problem for struggling businesses. In April, Zimbabwe’s central bank introduced a new currency called the Zimbabwe gold or ZiG to rein in hyperinflation and currency instability. It is the sixth local currency used since the 2009 collapse of the Zimbabwe dollar when hyperinflation hit 231 million percent before the government stopped measuring it.

The ZiG, which the government says is backed by gold reserves, foreign currencies and precious metals, held steady against major currencies, such as the US dollar which is used in some 90 percent of transactions in the country, for a few weeks but has rapidly lost its value against the major currencies over the past several weeks on the parallel or so-called black market.

This stokes inflation, which was officially recorded at 1.4 percent in August. With prices rising still, the September figure is expected to be higher.

However, some experts believe inflation is already much higher than this. Johns Hopkins economics professor Steve Hanke argues the government is massaging the real inflation figure. He claims the real rate is 894 percent, the highest in the world.

The government has dismissed Hanke’s method of calculating inflation as misleading. The South African rand, the Botswana pula, and the British pound are also currencies within the “multi-currency basket” that are legal tender in Zimbabwe.

Some economists predicted the ZiG would follow its five predecessors into the dustbin and likened the introduction of the ZiG to sticking a bandage onto a festering wound.

Among them was Gift Mugano of the Durban University of Technology, who was pilloried by some government officials for warning the ZiG would fail, but now feels vindicated. He told Al Jazeera that a lack of competitiveness is among a litany of reasons that all these iterations of Zimbabwean currency have failed. “Zimbabwe is not competitive in terms of production at this time. We have had a drought of production over the last two decades.”

He noted that Zimbabwe’s over-reliance on imports has “destroyed” local manufacturing, not just the clothing and textile sectors.

Second to the lack of competitiveness, Mugano said, is the issue of confidence. “People don’t trust the local currency, and they’d rather have US dollars whose value is predictable. This raises the demand for the greenback, putting pressure on the local currency,” he said. The government itself demands payment for passports in US dollars. Fuel is also sold in dollars.

One of Truworths’s major selling points was offering pay-as-you-wear credit to its customers, whereby they pay off whatever they bought over an agreed period.

However, with Zimbabwe’s economy on a downward trend and an estimated 80 percent of Zimbabweans not formally employed, the pool of eligible customers for this has shrunk since only those employed officially and paid in US dollars qualify for the credit.

Workers at Kingsport Factory in Harare, Zimbabwe [Ish Mafundikwa/Al Jazeera]

‘They have reduced the country to a supermarket’

Other clothing companies have been similarly affected. Energy Deshe is the General Manager of Kingsport Investments, a company specialising in manufacturing protective clothing, promotional wear, corporate clothing, screen printing, and embroidery.

He is also the vice chairman of the Zimbabwe Clothing Manufacturing Association. He shares Ndebele’s exasperation about illegal imports and laments the lack of action from the authorities. “The clothes are brought into the country illegally; by allowing their open sale, it seems the authorities have given the green light to the traders to do what they want,” he said.

The impact has taken a massive toll on jobs in the sector, he said. “It currently employs just over 4,000 people, down from more than 30,000 at its peak around 2001.”

Those who do operate within the law, he said, are effectively punished for doing so via relatively high labour costs, taxes, and the cost of applying for licences. “We just can’t compete with these clothes dumped into the country. They have reduced the country to a supermarket.”

Kingsport, which employed 700 people at the end of 2022, has been forced to scale down to 400 employees since then. While exports could boost earnings, he says government regulations act as a disincentive. “The government deducts 25 percent of whatever we’ll have earned from exports in US dollars and pays us the equivalent in local currency.” This refers to the requirement by the Central Bank that Zimbabwean exporters convert at least 25 percent of foreign earnings into local currency at the official exchange rate, which is significantly higher than the more widely used black market rates. Businesses say this leads to losses for them.

Being required to pay taxes in US dollars, facing difficulties with importing raw materials, new machinery or spare parts, and an erratic power supply all present additional obstacles for manufacturers in Zimbabwe.

In 2015, Zimbabwe banned imports of secondhand clothes for resale in an attempt to boost the clothing manufacturing sector. However, the government relented to pressure from people dealing in used clothes and introduced new import taxes on used clothing instead in 2017. Furthermore, anyone wanting to import preloved clothes is required to apply for a licence to do so.

A customs official who spoke to Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity as he is not authorised to talk to the media said importers are not inclined to obtain a licence as a “punitive” customs duty of $5 per kilogram plus 15 percent tax is then charged on those imports.

“If anybody pays those extra charges on secondhand clothes, it would not be viable,” he concluded. In any event, he said, the department has no record of any duty being paid on used clothes bales.

While the police do sporadically intercept trucks with bales of secondhand clothes, he said, “It seems it’s not enough.

“Every once in a while, the police call us to say they have intercepted a truckload of secondhand bales, but judging by the amount of clothes on the street, it’s clear most of the bales get through.”

When Al Jazeera contacted the Ministry of Industry and Commerce department that issues import licences, an official there said that the department had not issued a single licence for the import of secondhand clothes.

Zimbabwe Republic Police spokesperson Commissioner Paul Nyathi confirmed that the smuggling of secondhand clothes into the country is common. “We have an ongoing operation against smuggling which includes used clothing; we have recovered bales of clothing, which we have surrendered to the customs department,” he told Al Jazeera.

He added that the police had arrested some customs, immigration and law enforcement officers for working with the smugglers.

Despite all that, the secondhand clothes trade continues to flourish in Zimbabwe, with some sellers openly advertising on social media, where their phone numbers and addresses are clearly on display.

A roadside shop outside a house in surburban Harare [Ish Mafundikwa/Al Jazeera]

‘We’d buy local – if the price was right’

Some countries in Africa have banned the import of used clothing altogether. “We can learn something from Uganda and Rwanda, who enforce bans on used clothing,” said Kingsport’s Deshe. “Their textile and clothing industries are flourishing.”

Clothes designer Joyce Chimanye, who worked for various clothes manufacturers before launching her own brand of clothing named Zuvva, said she believes enforcing the law and changing government policy could revive the ailing clothes retail and manufacturing sectors.

Before the secondhand clothing craze, she said, “There was a very high level of domestic apparel consumption, and the manufacturing sector was vibrant; the factories exported clothes for brands such as Littlewood, JCPenney, Gap, Levis and Banana Republic”. But that was before the country’s economic woes took hold and many have since shut up shop.

Chimanye said she believes Zimbabwe could learn from Bangladesh, which implemented market-oriented policies, including industry privatisation and trade liberalisation in the 1980s, to become the second-largest garment-producing country in the world.

According to data from the Bangladeshi Export Promotion Bureau, the county’s textile and garment industry now employs more than 4 million people.

While the customers of preloved clothing that Al Jazeera spoke to are happy with the low prices, the quality, and the variety of used clothes they have access to, they said they would also be happy to buy locally manufactured clothes on condition that the cost and quality are right.

“We’d buy local clothes if the prices, quality, and variety are addressed,” Kimberley Dube says.