?? Mark's Favourites: Reimagining Circular Economy Initiatives
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One of the most crucial areas that fashion brands are exploring is about their role in the circular economy and especially how initiatives can be completed at scale.
Earlier this year, Japanese fashion retailer UNIQLO held a two-part road trip to the US and Europe to discuss how it is trying to extend its repair and re-use service within some of its larger stores.
It is a commendable project but the Tokyo-based management freely admitted that taking it from a bespoke to a mainstream offer was going to be tough, and a nut it is yet to crack.
French consumers can also take advantage of the government’s ‘repair bonus’, with around 700,000 tonnes of clothing discarded each year in the country.
To help fight waste, France has launched a scheme that will allow people to claim back between €6 and €25 of the cost of mending clothes and shoes at affiliated workshops and footwear repairers.
The scheme will launch in October and will be run by specialist Octavia by Theodora AI .
Recently US fashion staple Gap moved in on an already growing trend for Gap Vintage, working with Gap superfan Sean Wotherspoon – an American vintage collector and retailer and a founder of the NFT digital fashion brand MNTGE – to create a limited assortment drop.
The US chain had picked up on resale platform Depop and marketplace eBay, which had?reported strong vintage Gap sales.
Wotherspoon sourced the drop from Gap archive fashions from the three decades from the 1980s onwards, plus merchandise he found in flea markets and at second-hand clothing stores around the world.
What followed was a big success. All the items, priced from $55-$90, sold out shortly after launch, including striped denim overalls, jean jackets, relaxed cut shorts and logo tees, offered via Gap’s website and at The Grove, Los Angeles store.
Not surprisingly, more collaborations are slated throughout the year, while others have also explored the vintage channel
Levis’Store first launched Levi’s SecondHand in 2020, with a buyback programme operated by Trove. And in April, Wotherspoon’s MNTGE partnered with Levi’s for the MNTGE Fruits and Veggies collection, featuring a mix of Levi’s denim embedded with NFC chips with numbered, collectible denim art tokens.
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Denim brands Lee and Wrangler have also released small vintage drops, using merchandise sourced by their teams.
And in Europe activity is growing around this area, as brands attempt to connect with consumers over their approach to sustainability.
US outdoor fashion and sports retailer The North Face is to launch its re-use service for Europe in the UK first, while Emily Bolon , CEO of Looper Textile Co. , which works with H&M among others, stresses of reuse strategies: “All garments have value, even outside their primary channel. Demand for recycled fibres is growing so much but the reality is 60% of unwanted garments in Europe are thrown away, 82% in the US.”
She says that retailers need to make it easier for consumers and then look to the opportunities about scale and what the industry can do with garments that do not have an obvious end use.
Looper has handled over 40 million garments so far.
“What doesn't work is when each retailer tries to come up with its own closed loop solution,” she says.
At the front end, Google Cloud Fashion & Beauty director Maria McClay says that resale, recommerce and upcycling are all important but that using technology such as improved demand forecasting, which is both margin preserving and also sustainable, is another way retailers can tackle the issues while maintaining profitability.