Goods in Sõbralt Sõbrale stores largely continue to come from our Swedish partners. Thanks to this partnership, we are able to offer such a rich selection of home goods and furniture. What is less known, however, is that all of our foreign partners make a conscious choice to support Sõbralt Sõbrale’s charitable work through their donations. This is driven by a shared mission. Without a doubt, our largest partner is Erikshjälpen—a globally recognized children’s aid organization highly beloved in Sweden—whose new leadership team visited Estonia for the first time from April 14 to 16.
During this three-day visit, we welcomed Erikshjälpen’s Secretary General Mattias Ingeson, Retail CEO Jerker Sandell, Logistics Manager Martin Borgvall, and Communications Manager Helena Lind. This was far from a mere courtesy call. Over the course of three days, we held highly concrete discussions regarding the future of our cooperation, the development of our stores, the visibility of our charitable mission, and ways to make the second-hand supply chain even more efficient for both parties.
The guests were deeply moved by our work with youth and children, as well as the church-led initiatives through which we engage local communities. In turn, they shared a highly engaging format called “futurelab” (Framtidsverkstad), which creates a gathering space for families—including youth and children—to practice social skills together.
One of the most significant outcomes of the meeting was our agreement to move forward with a strategic partnership contract. This agreement will help formalize the shared principles, goals, and values of our cooperation, which has spanned more than 20 years. Both organizations recognize that we are connected by much more than the movement of goods from Sweden to Estonia: we share a deep desire to help children, youth, and families, and to express Christian care through practical actions.
This value-based cooperation needs to be clear and transparent to our retail customers and local donors as well, demonstrating that the product selection in Sõbralt Sõbrale stores is secured by our Swedish partners’ carefully chosen contribution to local charity. Jerker Sandell even suggested that we should actively feature each other’s brands in our public introductions, making the nature of our partnership immediately clear to everyone.
We also dedicated substantial attention to logistics and inventory flow. In recent years, it has been an issue that a portion of the goods arriving in Estonia are no longer appealing to local customers and become unsellable. We jointly acknowledged that the changes implemented last year in product selection and sorting have yielded excellent results, helping to reduce the share of unsuitable items. Moving forward, we set a shared goal to reduce unsellable inventory even further. To achieve this, we plan to improve feedback loops, strengthen communication between stores, refine training materials, and share more operational data in both directions.
Helena Lind, the Communications Manager, also led a highly productive workshop focused on the visibility of our charitable mission. We discussed how to communicate our activities so that the public better understands the connection between donating, reuse, and charity. A key takeaway was that charity should not only be visible in specific social projects and financial reports, but should also shine through in the daily life of our stores, the experience of our donors, and the overarching story we tell.
By the end of the gathering, there was a resonant feeling that Sõbralt Sõbrale and Erikshjälpen have entered a new era of cooperation. While we previously focused primarily on the practical logistics of inventory flow, we are now increasingly discussing how to learn from one another, develop our organizations together, advocate for shared interests—such as extended producer responsibility (EPR) in textiles—and tell a unified story of how charitable circularity can lift up both people and the planet.
