About Sustaining Voices
Sourcing Journal’s Sustaining Voices celebrates the efforts the apparel industry is making toward securing a more environmentally responsible future through creative innovations, scalable solutions and forward-thinking initiatives that are spinning intent into action.
Overview
The Renewal Workshop gives lightly damaged garments a life beyond the landfill.
Deep Dive
When inventory is damaged, everybody loses.
The Renewal Workshop, an Oregon-based provider of circular solutions, is changing that equation by teaming with brands to help unsellable products reach their maximum value. Chief among the company’s goals: to shift the industry’s lopsided focus from discarding or recycling lightly flawed goods to repairing them for reuse.
“The emphasis should be on ensuring a product has a long life before it is moved into a use where the value of the product is less valuable,” said Renewal Workshop co-founder Nicole Bassett, citing the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s circular economy “butterfly” diagram, where materials are in continuous flow, as a reference. “This is why repair and repurposing should be the first recourse for a product. Only then when a product cannot be used in its original intent should it be moved into a channel like recycling.”
The Renewal Workshop currently counts among its partners 20 apparel businesses, most of them outdoor-wear brands such as Icebreaker, Nau and The North Face. Its partnership last year with Mara Hoffman, a New York purveyor of women’s ready to wear and swimwear, marked The Renewal Workshop’s first foray into fashion with a capital F.
“Our goal at The Renewal Workshop is to be of service to any apparel and textile brand, so starting our partnership with Mara Hoffman was a really exciting moment for our company,” Bassett said. “We are big fans of the sustainability work that the team at Mara Hoffman has been investing in under the leadership of Mara herself. So when we started talking about how it could execute on its circular strategy, we had the chance to bring our services outside of the outdoor brands and show that we can also serve fashion brands.”
Although the company, which joined Fashion for Good’s Scaling Programme last November, envisions itself expanding into additional apparel segments, its primary focus is educating consumers and the industry on why the circular economy matters. While consumers are growing more accepting of purchasing repaired apparel, they still want to be assured they’re receiving high-quality products from their favorite brands, Bassett said.
Still, businesses carry their own set of misconceptions, and changing mindsets can be challenging. This is unsurprising, Bassett admitted, as apparel brands have been generating their revenue from one path—making and selling new products—and adding renewal services is, well, new.
At the same time, there’s safety in numbers, and as more brands enter the renewal space and test circular business models such as clothing rental, other companies may be more amenable to experimentation.
“The largest challenge for a brand is that the products today entering a renewed sales channel were never designed to be resold again, so information like product data, durability of the products and the financials are going to require a transition time to become more efficient,” said Bassett. “But that will come as companies start down the path of becoming circular.”
In what areas has the fashion industry made the biggest strides in sustainability in the last five years?
“I have been doing sustainability in the apparel and fashion industry for 15 years and what has blown me away is how many brands have shifted from sustainability as a nice-to-have into sustainability as a must-have. Brands that I never thought would be serious about their impact have not only well-resourced sustainability teams, but are measuring and taking direct action to making change. The other area in which major strides have occurred is in the awareness and adoption of circular concepts.”