An entrepreneur of impact, Yasmin Grigaliunas is a rare force with an intense passion for helping others. Founder of The World’s Biggest Garage Sale (WBGS), Yasmin’s biggest mission is to “make a difference and create meaningful impact daily”.
Less than a decade on, Yasmin has introduced new business models, created new markets, and disrupted long-held patterns of consumption. The icing on the cake was when her team was awarded the Office of the Queensland Chief Entrepreneur Chief’s Innovation Award for the Brand of the Year in 2019. WBGS started as a hobby back in 2013, a spring clean resulted in a garage sale to sell the family stuff and then donate the money to charity, says Yasmin. Realising the positive impact made, she made a call out to friends and family. Ultimately, this resulted in hundreds of others wanting to do a similar thing. Before Yasmin knew it, The World’s Biggest Garage Sale was born in 2014. WBGS is a Brisbane based organisation designing solutions to commercialise the circular economy by activating dormant goods for reuse. WBGS works towards this with the vision of People, Planet and Purpose.
WBGS events provide the community with alternate ways to source and purchase high quality clothing, antiques, furniture, whitegoods and other products at affordable prices. They promote recycling and reuse to engage the community members in sustainable forms of shopping that diverts waste from landfill and creates a second life for products that were otherwise unused or unwanted. Yasmin has worn many hats throughout her career — sales, business development, project management, training, admin, customer experience — to name just a few. However, the cause closest to Yasmin’s heart led her to become an entrepreneur and to ditch her corporate career, committing full time to her role as CEO and co-founder of WBGS. Today, Yasmin says that leaving her corporate career and the regular pay cheque behind was “exciting, exhilarating, hard and difficult. But it was and still is one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life”.
“Watching some people really downsize and change their consumption patterns, especially volunteers, really keeps me going. Our community has grown; new tribes and micro-tribes have formed and volunteers and donors keep coming back year after year,” says Yasmin. The West End community has particularly aided WBGS’s efforts with donors, volunteers and even shoppers coming from the area. “I think people from West End are particularly engaged with our events as they are a very socially conscious and environmentally minded community.” Yasmin and WBGS have taken their work online in 2020 in response to the Coronavirus pandemic, but still have plans for regional expansion in the future. WBGS now also partners with retailers to repurpose returned goods, bringing new life to discarded products that were previously dormant, unused and underutilised. Yasmin is proud of having achieved her 2019 goal of running 2019 kilometres by running every single day throughout the year. “It has taught me greatly about mind over matter,” says the endurance advocate. She has now decided to run a total of 2020 kilometres in 2020, albeit in a pair of recycled runners.
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