When the only thrift store in Amsterdam Nieuw-West, burned to the ground, nobody replaced it. For three years the neighbourhood went without a place to donate a coat, browse secondhand books, or dig up an old record. Angie and three other local women, Lisa, Ruby and Zohra, decided to fix that themselves. In June 2023, they opened Muna. The name Muna comes from the Arabic word for wishes, desires, and commune. A fitting double meaning for a shop built entirely around the neighbourhood it serves.
Muna takes in clothing, books, records and home accessories, all donated by people from Nieuw-West, and prices everything to stay affordable for a district that Amsterdam’s own headlines don’t always treat kindly. The coffee corner is supplied by Steans Beans, and the kitchen turns out homemade vegan and gluten-free treats alongside a weekly matcha, so a visit rarely ends at the clothing rail.
What sets Muna apart is what happens around the racks. It runs weekly workshops, keeps a guestbook full of handwritten notes from neighbours and much more. An independent social impact study of Muna’s first sixteen months found that people from the neighbourhood genuinely felt at home there, not just customers passing through. Muna is run entirely by women from Nieuw-West and still leans on word of mouth more than advertising, though a feature in Het Parool and a nomination for the Onarm Prijs, to be decided in October and broadcast on AT5, have started drawing visitors from further across the city.
The shop is open Tuesday to Sunday, 11:00 to 18:00, at Koningin Wilhelminaplein 1. Dogs and laptops are welcome, donations come in daily so the shelves never look the same twice, and most visitors still come from Nieuw-West itself or the city centre just across the water. For a neighbourhood of well over a hundred thousand people that spent years without a single secondhand shop, Muna has quietly become the place where people go to find something, and to be found themselves.
