From the Sector

The Award honours charity shops that significantly benefit their communities. Salvation Army Trading Company Ltd. (SATCoL), which manages over 260 shops on behalf of the charity, picked up the award in recognition of its broad and far-reaching work.

The award category focuses on how charity shops provide significant benefits to people in local communities, volunteers, colleagues, shoppers and donors. Highlights include the provision of over 6,000 free clothing vouchers for those in need (an increase of 28% year-on-year). A successful trading year saw SATCoL open 13 large format donation centres, refurbish 5 high street shops and serve 6.9m customers in their stores (a 15% increase on the previous year). 

SATCoL also runs a number of social impact initiatives including a partnership with HMP Five Wells which has seen over 9,000 denim bags made from unwearable jeans, by prisoners, and sold in its charity shops. An IT Reuse Scheme has seen over 4,000 devices collected, with around 20% refurbished and offered at affordable prices.

In supporting paid and volunteer colleagues, SATCoL has continued to invest in wellbeing, training and benefits. The Charity Shop chain has 10 dedicated wellbeing champions, and 228 managers have completed certified Mental Health England Training with a further 58 trained as Mental Health First Aiders. SATCoL’s award-winning e-learning platform, The Learning Booth, delivers free, bespoke and certified courses to all colleagues. In the past year, a further 12,000 courses have been completed by paid and volunteer colleagues, an increase of 20% year-on-year). 

This recognition adds to the previous CRA awards won by SATCoL: Outstanding Charity Retailer of the Year in 2024 and 2022, and the Environment and Sustainability Award winner in 2024.  

The award was presented at the CRA Annual Conference held at the Harrogate Convention Centre on 25thJune 2025.

SATCoL, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of its parent charity, exists to ‘enable mission and provide resources to help the work of The Salvation Army’. In the past ten years alone, SATCoL has raised over £90m for The Salvation Army. 

Researchers at Cornell have developed a new type of smart clothing that can track a person’s posture and exercise routine but looks, wears – and washes – just like a regular shirt.

The new technology, called SeamFit, uses flexible conductive threads sewn into the neck, arm and side seams of a standard short-sleeved T-shirt. The user does not need to manually log their workout, because an artificial intelligence pipeline detects movements, identifies the exercise and counts reps. Afterward, the user simply removes a circuit board at the back neckline, and tosses the sweaty shirt into the washing machine.

The team envisions that SeamFit could be useful for athletes, fitness enthusiasts and patients engaged in physical therapy.

Most existing body-tracking clothing is tight and restrictive or embedded with chunky sensors, according to Catherine Yu, a doctoral student in the field of information science and lead researcher on the project.

“We were interested in how we can make clothing smart without making it bulky or unusable,” Yu said, “and to push the practicality, so that people can treat it the way they would usually treat their clothing.”

Alternatively, athletes can choose fitness trackers, like smartwatches or rings, but these are extra devices that people may not want to wear while exercising, and can’t track movement across the entire body.

“Not everyone is willing to try out a new wearable form factor, but people will have clothes on,” said co-author Cheng Zhang, assistant professor of information science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. “We provide a very neat form factor that is always on you.”

Their study,“SeamFit: Towards Practical Smart Clothing for Automatic Exercise Logging,” published in March in the Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, and will be presented at the UbiComp/ISWC 2025 meeting in October.

Most mass-produced clothing has seams, which Yu realized could be exploited to make a comfortable, affordable piece of smart clothing. She constructed three SeamFit shirts – in small, medium and large – using a home sewing machine to attach conductive threads on top of the seams. The three sizes allowed users to choose a looser or tighter fit, but did complicate the process of interpreting each user’s movements.

To test the shirts’ performance, the team recruited 15 volunteers, who did a series of 14 exercises – including lunges, sit-ups and biceps curls – while wearing SeamFit. Without any calibration or training for each user, SeamFit’s model classified the exercises with 93.4% accuracy and successfully counted reps, with counts that, on average, were off by less than one.

SeamFit works because when people exercise, the threads’ capacitance – their ability to store charge – changes as the threads move, deform and interact with the human body. The circuit board at the back neckline measures the capacitances and transmits them through a Bluetooth connection to a computer. A customized, lightweight signal-processing and machine-learning pipeline then deciphers the movements.

After the workouts, Yu washed and dried the shirts at home.

The project is a new iteration of SeamPose, a previous effort to track body postures using conductive threads in eight seams of a long-sleeve T-shirt.

The team envisions that this type of unobtrusive smart clothing could be especially useful for athletes logging their exercise routines and for physical therapists monitoring the progress of patients at home.

More broadly, this type of technology could assist with human-AI interaction, because by tracking human movements and activities, AI can better understand when to interact and when to wait – such as when someone is eating or sleeping.

Enabling AI to understand human activity is the main focus of Zhang’s Smart Computer Interfaces for Future Interactions (SciFi) Lab, which develops new, AI-powered wearable sensing systems, to enable AI to comprehend human activities and intentions in everyday settings and provide support when needed.

“While this paper demonstrated the approach for a simple garment, we believe it can easily be adapted to a wide range of garments and could take advantage of the complex seam patterns of advanced sportswear,” said co-author François Guimbretière, professor of information science in Cornell Bowers CIS and the multicollege Department of Design Tech.

To create SeamFit, Yu set up a “little sewing factory” in the lab. However, she is currently exploring how the manufacturing process could be affordably scaled up, using industrial serger machines – which sew and make seams using three or four threads simultaneously – and more robust conductive threads.

“By just replacing a single thread in this mass manufacturing process, all of the clothing could easily become smart and be able to have this motion tracking capability,” Yu said. “I’m imagining one day, you open your closet and there’s really no difference between smart and nonsmart clothing.”

Additional authors on the study include Manru Mary Zhang ’25 and Luis Miguel Malenab ’25; Chi-Jung Lee and Ruidong Zhang, both doctoral students in the field of information science; and Jacky Hao Jiang, a visiting undergraduate from Rice University.

Funding for this work came from the National Science Foundation.

London Marathon Events (LME) partnered with the Salvation Army Trading Company (SATCoL), the trading arm of The Salvation Army, to collect discarded participant clothing at its event in London. On 21st April The Salvation Army collected a record 18.9 tonnes of clothing from the mass participation event.

Salvation Army volunteers and helpers supported to collect clothing discarded by participants prior to the Start line. The clothing was transported to The Salvation Army’s processing centre in the East Midlands for sorting and distribution to be resold, reused or recycled.

The profits that the Salvation Army Trading Company raise, is donated to The Salvation Army to continue to support the work they do across the UK.

The scheme is one of LME’s new sustainability initiatives for 2024 aimed at reducing the environmental impact of its events, with a particular focus on lowering carbon emissions, cutting waste and improving circularity.

The Salvation Army team will continue with the clothing collections at the following events this year:

• Ford RideLondon on Sunday 26 May
• The Big Half on 1 September
• The Vitality London 10,000 on 22 September
• The Royal Parks Half on 13 October

India’s world famous Blue City, Jodhpur, has been repainted and refreshed by AkzoNobel as part of a major “Let’s Colour” project involving 250 homes.

More than 5,600 liters of Dulux paint has been used to revitalize the iconic area of Rajasthan, which is known the world over as a leading tourist destination. As well as painting exterior walls in a distinctive shade of vibrant blue, the roofs of more than 100 houses have been coated with Dulux Weathershield Protect, which can help to reduce temperatures by up to 5˚C.

In addition, 20 colorful murals have been created along the ancient streets leading up to Mehrangarh Fort, which towers over the city. All the work, which took around four months to complete, was carried out by AkzoNobel Paint Academy painters, local artists and residents, and AkzoNobel volunteers, who combined their creative talents.

The color blue has been an integral part of Jodhpur’s identity for centuries. And reigniting the city’s timeless appeal – making it more liveable and enjoyable – was key to the whole project. So in addition to painting more than 250,000 square feet of walls, community walkways and staircases have also been given a rainbow makeover using Dulux FloorPlus paint.   

AkzoNobel’s global “Let's Colour” initiative was launched in 2009. To date, more than 2,300 projects have taken place, with over 1.3 million liters of paint being donated all over the world.