My favourite piece of clothing is an emerald sweater with tiny red hearts all over it.
It’s soft, cozy, made for relaxing cold mornings and it reminds me of the winter holidays.
And I bought it from the Kings SPCA Thrift Store.
I’m not the biggest thrifter, but it’s hard to resist a good deal that is also helping a good cause.
The Nova Scotia SPCA has four thrift stores across the province in Dartmouth, New Minas, Sydney, and Stellarton. I have visited three of them so far and left with something new each time that has made it on my top 10 favourite list.
The first store opened its doors to the public in 2017 and the fourth one just had its first customers in October of 2024.
In the last seven years, we have seen a lot of changes. This year alone brought a renovation to the Dartmouth store and a new location in Stellarton. But also brought Anya Zub, Regional Manager of Thrift.
Anya joined the SPCA Thrift team in March taking on the job with contagious enthusiasm and rising to the occasion each time, proving she was purrfect for the job. 
“I love retail so much. I just think there’s something really cool about making micro-connections with customers when they’re on a journey for ‘a little treat’.” I spent years in specialty retail, where we joke that ‘we sell things people don’t need.’ And, after growing my role as a seasonal clerk into a multi-departmental managerial role I realized that I didn’t really want to do anything else with my occupational time. Obviously, the pandemic changed the retail landscape and how we spend time in stores and engaging customers, so I bounced a little between 2020 and 2024 – I even spent a few years managing veterinary hospitals. I found myself looking for a new opportunity in January of this year and it seemed to be fate when this job was available. Having been in the role for about eight months now I honestly couldn’t see myself doing anything else. I’m very happy to be here,” she shared.
Her love for retail and thrift is evident in the way she talks about projects and the stores. While you might find similar donations in the stores, the same signs and sales, each store is unique giving a glimpse into the communities they are a part of.
I asked Anya to share a little glimpse into each store’s uniqueness.
“Dartmouth is city-accessible so it tends to carry the expected variety of antiques, classic collectibles and vintage items, but many of their unique items can include high-end kitchen products, name-brand bags and shoes as well interesting art and prints.”
“Kings is consistently surprising in the amount of antique treasures that come through the doors – sometimes the furniture area looks like a tiny museum featuring chairs through history. It’s not unusual to find some very cool kitchen 
cottagecore items mixed in with Star Wars collectibles and vintage comics.”
“Cape Breton is huge, at 10,000 square feet they honestly have a little of everything on their salesfloor all the time, with lots of room for more! If you love to browse racks for hours this is the place to spend time. The really unique items you can score in Cape Breton are often high-end labels on jewelry, watches, clothing and accessories.”
“North Nova is not only our first purpose-built store, but it’s the first store for which I’ve been able to participate in the processing, planning and opening.
From a store management perspective – I hope we’re a big success and North Nova Thrift serves its community well and successfully. From a retail nerd perspective – I’m excited to try a few different things in how we can merchandise our floors to drive sales and enchant our customers. I think there’s so much we can learn about how to create exciting and fun shopping experiences from a fresh location.”
For a lot of people reading this, the most surprising thing might be that we carry more than pet items. In fact, our pet section in each store is pretty tiny, with hooman clothing being the main seller and donation drive. 
“But also, we work really hard to maintain fair pricing. Our thrift stores exist to ensure a steady stream of revenue for our programs and services, but we also care deeply about keeping families together – including pets. When everything is getting more expensive, we want to make sure that our stores remain an affordable option when it comes to getting household goods, clothing and little treasures,” Anya added to the list of things the public might not know about our thrift stores.
One thing we can’t forget about is our Loyalty Program where you can earn points you can later redeem in our stores. It’s easy to sign up, online or in person and you can start earning points immediately. And we’re always looking for ways to make your shopping experience better with each visit.
Our community is important to us and without our loyal customers and donors we wouldn’t be able to fulfill our cause. And don’t forget…
Shopping is the best way to support our stores!
If you want to know where to find the nearest Nova Scotia SPCA Thrift Store, what type of donations we accept, and a little bit more about our Loyalty Program, you can visit our website or follow us on our Facebook pages.
We can’t wait for you to visit our stores, donate, browse and purr-chase!
P.S.: Earlier this year, Anya was a guest on our Nova Scotia SPCA PAW’dcast and you can listen to that episode here.