While Fashion Brands Bet on Resale, Rental and Upcycling; Here Is a Fourth Circular Economy Option Few Are Talking About
Hello and welcome to the 43rd issue of moderated, a newsletter created to dive into insights and phenomenons of the Fashion Industry. It also has a curation and summary of the most talked about last week’s events of the industry, offering further readings for more details.
If you are new here, welcome! I hope I can somehow help you to keep up with the fast-paced Fashion Industry.
Also, subscribe to receive a weekly issue by e-mail…
In this week’s moderated, I analysed the product maintenance service and why it is so underexplored by the fashion industry.
But before jumping into the main article, check the last week’s recap of the Fashion Industry.
Last Week’s Recap
South Korea’s Department Store Sales Exceed Pre-Pandemic Levels
The start of spring and the ongoing vaccinations have boosted consumption in South Korea. Last weekend, the country saw its department stores exceeding their pre-pandemic sales. During the weekend of 5-7 of March, stores such as Hyundai Department Store, Lotte Department Store, and Shinsegae Department Store saw sales increases of up to 109.8% compared to the same period in 2020, and up to 26.7% compared to 2019. Luxury products performed especially well.
To read more about the boost of South Korean department stores, check this report from The Korea Bizwire.
…
Ralph Lauren Launches New Circularity Strategy With Resale and Rental
Earlier this month, Ralph Lauren entered the rental market with the launch of its subscription program called “The Lauren Look”. Last week, Ralph Lauren gave another step towards more responsible business models. The brand announced its new circular economy strategy. The new circular approach includes plans to create collections that could support recycling and reselling of pre-loved Ralph Lauren pieces, starting in 2022. The label also aims to certify five products under Cradle to Cradle standard. This certification evaluates if goods meet specific environmental and social criteria. On top of that, Ralph Lauren has pledged to offer products with 100% recycled cotton by 2025.
…
Taipei Held First Entirely Physical Fashion Week of 2021
Last week, from 10 to 15 of March, Taipei had the first entirely physical fashion week of 2021. The city was able to have the autumn/winter edition the old-fashioned, in-person way because of Taiwan’s competence in holding the pandemic. Taipei’s fourth fashion week started with Shiatzy Chen, one of Taiwan’s most established designers, followed by names such as Douchanglee and Uuin.
You can check all the shows on Taipei Fashion Week’s Youtube channel.
…
Net-a-Porter Released Localised Platform for the Middle East
The online luxury fashion platform Net a Porter finally made its debut in one of the largest luxury markets in the world - the Middle East. The e-tailer created an app and a website in both Arabic and English. The platforms offer localised editorial content and product curation. In addition, Net-a-Porter stated it still has future developments being prepared for the region, such as in-market personal shopping and collaborations with local designers.
…
Zara’s Owner Inditex Has a Net Profit Drop of 70% in 2020
Inditex, the parent company of brands such as Zara, Pull & Bear, and Bershka, has pointed the store’s closure due to the pandemic as the main reason for its poor performance in 2020. The Spanish group reported a net profit fall of 70% last year. However, Inditex forecasted healthy sales as soon as lockdowns are lifted. As of March 15, 15% of the group’s stores are still closed due to Covid-19 restrictions.
Check Inditex’s Full Year 2020 Results Report and Presentation.
While Fashion Brands Bet on Resale, Rental and Upcycling;
Here Is a Fourth Circular Economy Option Few Are Talking About
I was getting some spring clothes out of my luggage and I noticed the zipper is not working properly. My luggage is from Samsonite and I will tell you my next steps in the end of the article. For now, let me ask you: Do you see Samsonite as a sustainable brand? I will guess that most people answered no. So let me change your mind.
In 2019 I participated in a competition with Kering with my partner Dhwani Kathotia (which is partially responsible for this article, because we researched about this together at the time). We had to create a circular economy project for Gucci. I can’t share details of the project, but I can say we took a more unexpected route than most participants - and would say that is what made us finalists. There are a few ways to approach circular economy in fashion. So far, the practice the fashion industry most explored is upcycling. Lately, we’ve been seeing other practices such as resale and rental becoming more popular, with big names such as Gucci and Ralph Lauren approaching them. However, there is a fourth way to apply circular economy to fashion that only a few brands used. Most of the labels that use this fourth circular economy practice don’t even acknowledge they have an eco-friendly approach, while the ones that do, are known as radically sustainable brands. But what is this mysterious and underexplored fourth circular economy practice?
This is the approach Dhwani and I chose to create a project for Gucci and the more we would research about it, the more it made sense for us. But why aren’t more brands seeing it? Well, there are some reasons for that and that’s what we will talk about this week. Why almost no one is betting on the circular economy practice of PRODUCT MAINTENANCE?
.
What is Circular Fashion Economy?
This term only surged in 2014, but it rapidly one of fashion’s most embraced sustainability concepts. Common Objective put together a definition of what circular fashion economy means, and I had to share it word by word with you because I could never say it better:
“A circular fashion industry is one in which waste and pollution are designed out, products and materials are kept in use for as long as possible, including through reusing and recycling, and where natural systems are regenerated.”
As explained by Common Objective, in an ideal circular fashion economy, there would be almost no waste. The small waste generated would be easily absorbed by nature. It is important to state it is different from a recycling economy, which focuses on dealing with waste. In a circular economy, close to nothing would be seen as waste, but as material to recreate and reinsert in the cycle. If you want to go deeper into the subject of circular fashion economy, I highly recommend this article from Common Objective.
The Global Fashion Agenda’s 2020 Circular Fashion System Commitment was signed by 86 brands and retailers from Adidas and H&M to Ganni and Reformation. From the 2017 targets set by the project, 132 were achieved. The Circular Fashion Partnership from Global Fashion Agenda has 30 participants, which include renowned fashion brands, manufacturers, and recyclers. It is visible that companies are aware of the importance of circular fashion. So why is it so important?
.
Why Do We Need a More Circular Fashion Industry?
If you heard fashion is the second most polluting industry after oil, you can forget that fact because it is not exactly true (read this article from Ecocult to understand it better). Regardless of not being the second most polluting industry, fashion is pretty bad for the environment. Here are some quick facts of how harmful the fashion industry is:
Clothing and accessories is the second most damaging industry when it comes to dumping plastic in the ocean.
94.4 million kg of waste were generated by single-use outfits in 2019.
1 in 2 people are throwing their unwanted clothes straight in the trash.
64% of the 32 billion garments produced every year end up in landfills.
Between 2000 and 2014, clothing production doubled with the average consumer buying 60% more pieces compared to the previous 15 before.
Each clothing item is now kept half as long as it was 15 years ago.
About 15% of fabric intended for clothing ends up on the cutting room floor.
Nearly 20% of global waste water is produced by the fashion industry.
In average, consumers throw away 32 kg of shoes and clothing annually, without recycling.
Globally, around 88% of textile waste goes to landfills where it occupies about 5% of landfill space and the amount is growing.
Up to 95% of the textiles that are land filled each year could be recycled or reused.
Believe me, I could go on, but I guess you got the idea. The fashion industry has a serious problem with waste and is not doing a great job finding a solution for it. Fashion consumption keeps increasing (without counting the pandemic impact of course), technology is still not there when it comes to recycle all garments, and trends come and go too fast. All that creates an insane amount of waste that is the problem circular economy aims to solve with different practices.
Of course, for many brands, the circular economy only became a business focus whenever consumers started to demand it. Not every fashion brand and retailer actually care about all these scary facts. However, with circular fashion doubling in searches in the last 5 years, according to Google Trends, it became impossible for fashion brands to ignore this consumer demand. Recently, with the introduction of new business models, circular fashion went from a marketing tool to an actual profitable strategy.
.
Conscious Production, Upcycling, Resale, and Rental
Whenever sustainability became a key consumer demand, most brands ran for conscious production. Garments’ manufacturers developed processes and materials with a smaller impact on the environment. For fashion brands, this was the first solution that came to mind for one simple reason: sales could keep rising. Brands wouldn’t be selling fewer pieces, consumption didn’t have to slow down, they would keep manufacturing more and more pieces, but in a more “sustainable” way. However, there are a few issues there.
The first and most obvious, the fashion industry is still producing way too many garments. Remember the no-so-fun fact that clothing production doubled between 2000 and 2014? You would have to cut in half the environmental impact of production to go back to the manufacturing impact on the planet of the year 2000. But then we have our second issue: our technology is not yet there.
Unfortunately, the fashion industry still hasn’t figured out how to produce goods on a large scale that are environmentally friendly enough to decrease half of the impact. H&M, for example, had many initiatives and technological developments that significantly improved the circularity of the fashion industry. But H&M is still a fast-fashion company that produces way too many garments. Its business model is part of the problem because, for now, in terms of technology, it can’t cut its impact on the environment that much. The UK, for example, had an initiative that managed to reduce carbon and footprints emissions per ton of clothing by 8% and 7% respectively from 2012 to 2019. This is great but not enough, especially with people buying more garments each year.
Then, a new concept started to surge – upcycling. In conscious production, the recycling side would make fabrics go throw the process of separating fibres to be transformed into a new fabric. In Upcycling, fabrics are can only be repurposed, sometimes even uplifted from their previous status. Simply picking an old garment and transforming it into a new one. To illustrate better, here is a simple example of upcycling:
Upcycling is not a new concept for small artisans. But in recent years, this practice started to get popularity in larger fashion labels, especially in the luxury sector. Marine Serre is a perfect example of a prestigious designer that features upcycled pieces in every collection. In fact, 50% of her line is made of upcycled materials. Unfortunately, it is challenging to work with upcycling on a large scale, especially if the company has a low-price positioning. Reformation is one of the brands that managed to work with upcycling in a larger-scale of production, but the products are very pricy.
Upcycling is an expensive process because it’s very “manual”. On top of that, finding enough of something to produce another something in big quantity is difficult, making it challenging to create an economy of scale. In addition, you are still siding with consumption, since in this model, the final consumer does not need to change his/her buying behaviour.
So that’s when new business models started to arise. It became clear that only making efforts on the production side was not enough if people just kept buying non-stop. The scenario was complex: there are a lot of clothes in perfect conditions, but people are throwing them out to follow the next trend. From this whole problematic situation, two main solutions started to afloat: rental and resale.
The fashion rental industry, lead by Rent the Runway, tried to solve the problem by allowing people to follow trends without necessarily buying new clothes. The model was “simple”:
The company owns a bunch of clothes. Consumers pay either a subscription or a fee to rent these clothes for a period. After using the garments, the consumer sends them back to the company. The company washes the product and rents it to the next person. People can follow trends without having to buy more clothes.
Perfect right? It is the ultimate solution. I mean, it’s a solution, but there are some issues with it. This model is far from simple. Many of the companies that offer this type of service already shared how complex it is to keep track of the inventory. But most importantly, it is still very unclear if fashion rental is indeed more sustainable than buying new pieces. According to Elle magazine, factors such as the carbon emission of products’ transportation (since everything is returned), the unsustainable packaging, and the insane amount of washing and dry cleaning involved in the service make specialists question if fashion rental can actually be called green. Regardless, with the success of companies such as Rent the Runway, many brands started to join the trend. The most recent was Ralph Lauren that released its rental service called “The Lauren Look”.
Amid the rental frenzy, resale quietly started to rise as a more sustainable option, until it became impossible to be ignored by fashion brands. Fashion resale does not need much explanation, is to resell a used garment, so someone else can keep using it. There are many clothes in the world already, let’s just exchange them with each other and we will have to produce fewer clothes.
Resale is obviously not something new. Thrift shops and vintage stores are a thing for a very long time. However, they did have a very specific customer. The mainstream consumer of fashion would usually not go for resold items. This is changing. With the rise of resale platforms such as Vestiaire Collective, Depop, Vinted, Enjoei, and others, buying used garments invaded the mainstream. So much that fashion brands started to realise there was no escape from it. They could either watch others making money selling their old pieces, or they could join it and profit from it. So it happened, many brands, from Burberry to Cos, are part of the resale market nowadays. The fashion luxury group Kering, which owns brands such as Alexander Mcqueen and Gucci, even invested in the resale platform Vestiaire Collective.
But again, no model is perfect. Even though resale offers a great opportunity to reframe clothes that otherwise would be simply discarded, it is still attached to the consumption culture. A research by Lyst identified the most popular pre-owned items to buy – bags, followed by jewellery and shoes. These three categories are known for their comprehensive manufacturing techniques. A ThredUP report also revealed that 66% of consumers use resale platforms to buy products from brands they would not be able to afford paying full price for. Thus, as Vogue explained:
“Customers aren’t searching specifically for “pre-owned” accessories, but for brands like Chanel and Céline, which have historically not been readily-available to buy new online.” – or they simply couldn’t pay for if it was new.
On top of that, searches for second hand pieces are extremely trend-led. According to Vogue, it is easy to identify peaks of research of momentary trends such as the 90s logomania, or the Dior saddle in pre-owned platforms. As much as younger consumers attribute thrifting to sustainability, their retail habits don’t match up. Unfortunately, there is a sign of a green-washed trend seeking in resale.
In any case, resale and rental do demand a larger consumer behaviour change. They do have a positive impact, even with some flaws. It is a process. But what if I told you there is a great solution for the fashion sustainability problem, it was always there, it unfortunately started to be used less, but it is easier and cheaper than any of the other models. Here we go…
.
Repair, Restore, Reuse
Yeah, it is nothing new. Actually, if you ask with someone older than 40 years old if they ever patched their clothes, they will almost certainly answer of course. Or you thought Patagonia was being beyond innovative when the brand started to offer repair for its products. Perhaps you already sent a Chanel bag to their atelier to fix a small problem the bag had, even if you paid, you trust Chanel with your Chanel right? Well, this is it. Most brands don’t even attribute this service to fashion circularity – only Patagonia, Patagonia knows what it’s doing. And that is why Samsonite, on my view, is a sustainable brand yesss. If don’t know, Samsonite offer a lifelong warranty to it’s clients. Therefore, if you have a luggage from the label and it has any issue, Samsonite will fix it without charges.
If the issue that almost no model figures to solve is the mindset of nonstop consumption, maybe offering services to keep your clothes for longer, even if you pay for it, is the answer. Don’t automobiles and electronics offer that? They charge for it yes, but can you imagine changing your car or every time there is a small issue? Why don’t we think the same about clothes? I mean, some of them cost almost the price of a popular car. So many companies already offer this service and miss the chance to claim the positive impact behind it. Mentioning the circularity of product maintenance is no green-washing, is a way to educate your consumers about the impact of a purchase, from its manufacturing to its discard.
Since most fashion brands don’t mention this service, or have this service not working well, or don’t even offer it, third-party businesses started to surge. The London-based Restory is one of the success cases of a company specialized in keeping your fashion items in good condition. So much that Farfetch recently partnered with them to create the repair service called Farfetch Fix. But why aren’t more brands screaming about their repair services? There are a few understandable reasons, and some of them have easy solutions.
.
Why Few Are Betting on Repair
Ok, let’s start with the solvable issue. This was a challenge Dhwani and I faced when creating a project for Gucci. One thing is Farfetch saying it will fix your products. They are not the ones producing it, don’t are not necessarily stating the products were bought at their website, they are offering a straightforward service. However, if, let’s say, Dior came and Launch something called Dior Fix, it would sound like Dior products will have problems in the future. Consumers may not appreciate the sensation of buying something that will need repair. I get it, it doesn’t sound good; it doesn’t sound luxury.
However, the solution is simple, it is a wording issue. The brand is not repairing; it is restoring the product, like a piece of art needs restoration once in a while. The brand is not fixing it; it is offering product maintenance. Depending on how much – and why - it can even be charged. Most luxury labels already offer this service, but since it is not a marketing focus, some of the repairs can take up to several months.
The next issue is a little more complex. Luxury labels have a better assurance in terms of quality and longevity of products. What about fast-fashion retailers? Indeed, a business model based on producing trend-led pieces that are supposed to be discarded fast so you quickly buy a new one doesn’t fit very well in the repair approach. But maybe, just maybe, the problem is not the repairing circular approach, but fast-fashion itself. At fast-fashion prices, it is cheaper to buy a new thing than to fix the old one. Just to give you an example:
I own a white fur coat from Zara that I paid £60 for (it was on sale). Since it is white, it gets dirty fast. Since it is fur, it needs dry cleaning. I own the coat for two years now. Each time I bring it to the dry cleaner, I spent around £20, and I did that 11 times since I bought the coat. The result - I already spent £220 washing my coat, almost 4 times the price I paid for the coat itself. Now can you imagine if I had to change the zipper or something? In terms of price, the wisest decision would be to just buy a new coat. Especially since I don't expect a Zara coat to last for that long anyway.
So of course, nowadays, with fast-fashion everywhere, if the product doesn’t have a great value proposition, isn’t on trend anymore, or didn’t cost you much, buying a new one is just more natural, easier, and cheaper than fixing it. Repair is the circular model that needs more behaviour change from consumers than brands. Product maintenance goes against the trend-led consumerism we are in today. And that brings us to the last issue of this model – or is it an issue?
Let’s start with the problem brands see. If you offer product maintenance (paid or not), more consumers will decide to keep their old garments instead of buying a new one. If that happens, the most logical conclusion is that, in the long term, brands’ sales would fall. Yes, it makes sense. But what if I told you this is not happening to the brands that decided to offer and strongly market this service? Nudie Jeans, for example, had a significant increase in sales since they started to offer repair services, and the brand’s revenues and profits are more than fine. Patagonia is another brand that the more it rejected consumerism, the more it sold. I do believe that the first brands to join this model will be the ones that will most beneficiate from it.
.
Product Longevity Is Key
At the end of the day, producing consciously, upcycling, renting, and reselling are still aligned to consumerism and still have an aggressive impact on the planet. Fashion companies need to lose the fear of allowing consumers to have their garments for longer. Fashion should be a long-term investment, brands should take more responsibility for their products’ longevity, and consumers should think more before adding one more item to their closet – as sustainable as that item is. And I include myself in that. I am far from a perfect fashion consumer. Changing is a process and we all need to relearn how to have a normal amount of clothes.
Thinking from this perspective, doesn’t Samsonite seem like a very sustainable brand? Perhaps, if brands that already offer product maintenance services won’t take pride in that, consumers could do it for them. Check if the brand you are buying from offers that before purchasing something. You will get surprised how many do offer, even if it is paid. Otherwise, support third-party services that can fix or restore your garments, and keep that product you bought years ago that you love so much. I will be fixing my Samsonite luggage without charges and keeping it, I hope, for many years to come.
Thanks for reading this week’s moderated and next Tuesday I will be back with more.
If you haven’t already, subscribe below to receive the moderated newsletter by email.
Also, share this post with friends and family - and don’t forget to leave a like at the heart at the end of the article! :)
Bye-bye and see you next week!
About the author behind the text
About the artist behind the illustrations
If you want, send suggestions, comments, or a hi to luizapplima@gmail.com