Hospice News

Employee Stories

Hi, I'm Sally, I'm the eBay Manager and work at the St Peter's Hospice warehouse in Avonmouth.

I took on the role as eBay Manager three years ago, after a career as a manager with Aldi. I wanted a job that suited my interests more and involved daytime hours rather than the shifts that I'd been working.

I was familiar with the Hospice before I started working for them as when we visited my grandparents, we'd walk nan and grandad from their house to the Portishead shop as it was nearby. Ten years ago, my nan received care from the Hospice at Home team when she was diagnosed with incurable lung cancer.

Our busiest days are Mondays when all the stock comes into our warehouse and must be sorted through by our team of staff and volunteers. Items of value sent from the Hospice shops arrive on Tuesday mornings and we look through them carefully, identifying the guideline price of each item that's been donated so that we can feature it in the right place and do justice to each item's worth. As well as using the eBay shop for resale, which celebrates its 15th anniversary this year, furniture and high value items are also sold through Clevedon auctioneers.

I'm currently busy setting up our new Depop shop which is due to launch mid-May. We've been building up a stock of clothes to feature on Depop including brands such as Burberry, Canada-Goose, and all manner of vintage and retro items.

One of the nicest sides of the job is that people deliberately seek us out to donate items to the Hospice. For example, one gentleman chose us to donate his collection of 36 gold sovereigns. We approached auction houses and looked at selling the sovereigns individually to decide which method of sale would return the highest value. In the end we chose to sell each sovereign individually, releasing one a week, and made a total of £9,500.

Some of the interesting items I've seen recently include a Geoffrey Baxter tangerine Whitefriars vase, and a gold rope chain necklace which sold for £800. We've found homes for a longbow, model sailing boats and a contraption that weighed and measured the size of an egg. Some of the weirdest things have sold for values that we wouldn't expect.

Our team choose the items that they are interested in researching. Staff member, Gemma has worked on the eBay shop for around eight years and is good at identifying jewellery, and the Hospice receives several military items which require research before we list them. Our staff learn a lot on the job about identifying valuable items and many have been to training days at auction houses. I'm a keen photographer and I enjoy discovering more about the specialist cameras which we receive, and I find the LPs interesting and spend time researching individual record presses.

We have some great donors in Bristol and more of the same would be lovely!

If you're interested in retail opportunities at St Peter's Hospice, we'd love to hear from you. Take a look at our retail roles on our current vacancies page.  

Current Vacancies