
Touchdown Thrift, a student-owned thrift store on campus, opened their doors Jan. 24 with nearly all of their inventory coming directly from the Occidental community. Located in what used to be the concessions stand for Kemp Stadium, Touchdown Thrift is a collaboration between Oxy Ecossentials, the ECON 201 Sustainability Lab and the Office of Sustainability.
According to Associate Professor of Economics Bevin Ashenmiller, who teaches the ECON 201 course, the project had been in the works for a long time.
“This is a dream that Isa and I have both separately had for many years,” Ashenmiller said.
Isa Merel ‘23, Occidental’s Assistant Sustainability Coordinator, said she has also been involved in the project since the beginning.
“Right when I started as a staff member, which was August 2023, one of my tasks was to reduce waste during [dorm] move out,” Merel said. “My first thought was, ‘If that’s our goal, we need to have an option for items to flow in and flow out,’ and a thrift store that could be open year-round made the most sense.”

According to Annabelle Ewing (junior), one of Touchdown Thrift’s co-founders, Oxy Ecossentials had already been running Green Move Out, a program where students can donate any unwanted or unused items at the end of the spring semester instead of throwing them out. Green Move Out holds an annual Fall Move-In Thrift Sale where many of the items that students donated the past spring are put on sale for the community.
“Before the thrift store opened, Ecossentials was [holding] move-in sales, but they had to donate so much of it, and so much of that we had to throw away,” Ewing said.
According to Stella Cammack (sophomore), another co-founder of Touchdown Thrift, the collaborators on the project worked to open Touchdown Thrift with this in mind.
“We were really successful in getting people into the space and getting some excitement about the new thrift store,” said Cammack.
Assistant Director of Sustainability Alisson Linder said on the day of the opening sale, Touchdown Thrift processed 265 transactions.
“On the first day it was open to the wider student body, over 10 percent of students chose to shop there,” Linder said.
According to Ashenmiller, even with this early success, there is still more to come. She said this period for the store is a baseline semester.
“It’s a heavy lift to get started, and then we’ll have a report and a proposal for next year,” Ashenmiller said. “Then we’ll be able to be like, ‘In the spring, this is how many people came, and this is how much money we made, and this is how much we diverted and these are how many donations we got.’”
Touchdown Thrift Co-Founder Jesse Principe (sophomore) said that for the students running Touchdown Thrift, the success has fueled ambitions for future projects which, while still in the planning phase, are objectives they see as attainable.
“Everything’s still up in the air and still planning, but we really want to host workshops teaching people repair techniques,” Principe said. “We want to be able to have [an] e-waste collection and [a] textile recycling collection so that these things that so-often [go] into landfills [don’t].”

According to Cammack, the team has been vocal about the broader impact they wish to achieve on campus moving forward. Cammack said in addition to diverting waste, they want to change the way the Occidental community thinks about consumption in general.
“Even if we don’t change people’s minds about overconsumption, [we want to] just bring attention to the fact of how much waste we create as a campus,” Cammack said.
Linder said she agrees with this idea of impacting the community as a whole.
“The point is [the store] has that behavioral change on the front end, but also the opportunity for scalability on the back end because [people are] learning how it works,” Linder said.
Ewing said the best way to get involved is by joining Ecossentials.
“That’s the most successful way to get into the loop of being in the shifts and also the more inner workings of it,” Ewing said.
According to Ashenmiller, the power of student involvement on Occidental’s campus is a strong force.
“My experience at Oxy is that the best things that we do around the environment are always started by student creativity,” Ashenmiller said.
Principe said the store will be open regularly beginning Jan. 27, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday and 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturdays.
Contact Toby Wepman at wepman@oxy.edu