Ripple is back for green consumers after a five-week closure for refurbishment
ROATH refill store Ripple has enjoyed a busy two weeks since reopening after a major refurbishment.
The refill store sells dried and frozen goods by weight for people to put in their own containers to avoid wasting single-use packaging, as well as other refillable products such as laundry liquid.
Owner Sophie Rae, 33, said: “We were closed for about five weeks – good work takes time – and when we reopened [on November 2] the community were back which was nice.”
Natalie Jones, from Pontprennau, visiting the shop for the first time since it reopened, said she was glad the refill store was back.
“I ended up buying lots of stuff I resented buying when it was closed. It looks really nice refurnished: there’s loads more stuff,” she said.
Ms Rae raised £33,000 through crowdfunding when she started Ripple in 2018 but that went straight into covering rent in a busy area, insurance, and fitting the tills and gravity containers.
“Everything else was very secondhand and volunteers were helping to build the units. The refurb was basically just finally being able to design to our specifications.”
The store is now fitted with custom-built shelving by Caephilly based interior designers Ongl.
“They’ve helped design it so that it’s now a much better, much more accessible use of the space and we can fit more products in there,” said Sophie.
Beth Dixon, who lives locally and has shopped at Ripple since the store opened, said that the refurbishment was “definitely a good improvement.”
“It’s good that they’ve got more different products so there’s a wider variety of stuff. I think it is a lot better actually, it’s more spacious”.
She told The Cardiffian that she liked to shop at Ripple because “all the products are really lovely, it’s a nice experience and, obviously, there’s the environmental side of it as well”.
Sophie’s decision to set up the refill store came from a combination of wanting to make sure Cardiff was living up to its green credentials and feeling a sense of devastation after watching David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II.
Inspired by refill stores that had opened in London, Bristol, and Crickhowell, Sophie thought that it was something Cardiff needed. She said there was clearly demand for shops like Ripple, with hundreds of refill stores and zero waste shops being set up as small businesses across the UK.
“It’s not really the responsibility of independent entrepreneurs to be changing the face of climate pollution in our country, but we do have impact within our small communities, which I think is very powerful,” she said.
Roath local Louise Robinson has been shopping at Ripple for about a year. She said: “I like to reduce my impact on the environment so I can come here and not have any packaging.
“It’s also a local business I want to support and the people are super friendly here.”
Nevertheless, Sophie thinks that the future of zero waste shopping relies on the people with more buying power than independent shops to make a bigger impact.
“The name came from the idea of a ripple created into a wave with more and more impact but we need policymakers and big corporations to be the ones that really make it more accessible to people because we are just one pin in the map.
“We know this isn’t going to save the planet but it’s a lovely way for our community to feel like they have some control over how they show up for their community and how they consume.”
