Repair Revolution

Consumers want unique and customised product to justify long term purchases. A sustainable future in fashion means changing ideal aesthetics to not mean brand new, perfectly pressed and unworn. The consumer must want their clothes to last long term.

The Restory

My newest Instagram addiction is watching videos by The Restory, there is something very ASMR and satisfying about watching their restoration videos. This UK company has been using top influencers to make restoring designer accessories on trend. In September 2019 The Restory began a partnership with Selfridges opening up a service at the Oxford st, London store, a customer can simply follow this process:

1) Drop your shoes, bags & accessories.

2) When they arrive in The Restory’s atelier you’ll be provided with a quote of services for your approval.

3) Restored and revived, collect your items in-store on a day convenient to you.

The Restory has high quality branding and customer awareness, they promote looking after your products and provide at home guides and videos for increasing the longevity their follower’s products. This gives people a reason to follow the company even if they aren’t willing to pay for their services, helping them increase in popularity. The business also provide a way of personalising products and changing to match current trends, they will mix the perfect colour for you pair shoes or handbag and even suggest new trending colourways on their Instagram.

From The Restory Guide to Restoring Trainers at Home

Nudie

Nudie denim is an incredible example of a brand that has incorporated garment care and repair into their business and branding. Every pair of Nudie jeans, no matter where you buy them, comes with a promise of free repairs. If there’s no Repair Shop around the corner from where you live and there are no planned visits from the Mobile Repair Station, you can order a free of charge Repair Kit. They also train their retail staff to sew/mend jeans in stores – this adds to customer care as well as theatre to the store experience.

Nudie Re-Use

If you don’t like your jeans anymore they will take them, mend them and resell for half the retail price of new jeans. Nudie has truly worked out how to celebrate ageing in their product and longevity for the customer.

Eileen Fisher

Eileen Fisher is an incredible example of early innovations in fashion sustainability. Stockpiling clothing before they knew how they would use it, Eileen Fisher were determined to find new ways of circularity. Eileen Fisher’s Green Eileen program stockpiled over 1 million garments in hopes to resell product, however, 50% of garments were too damaged to resell. They originally collected them to raise money for local women’s shelters. As the company needed people to spend a lot of time working on the solution to the huge stockpile they ran a competition and hired three graduates to run the project of figuring out how to reuse the product, their brief was to create a ‘profitable, beautiful, scalable’ solution. The team analysed many of the garments, gathering data, until they found trends in their faults. They found three ways of upcycling them: Natural dying (high margin), felting (small runs only) & resewing. They found a way to inventory all incoming garments, based on this data and the data collected from the trends in faults they could tell wholesale customers how much stock they could upcycle and sell. Their normal customer is a high income 65y/o however this range opened up a new customer for them who was younger and could afford this new lower pricepoint. For garments that aren’t quite 100% resellable they added a ‘needs love’ category. They also re-used trims from returned garments on new items.

Project Overheads:

Rent of storage facility
Staff wage - 3 designers in residence for 18 months
Materials/machinery costs for remanufacture
Retail/pop-up events

Renew project benefits:

Diverting clothing/textile waste from landfill
Building customer engagement/trust
Supporting philanthropic causes

Unexpected Renew project benefits:

More collaborative culture was developed between Renew team, Design & Merchandising
Incorporated technical (graders/pattern cutters) and production teams into design process.
Insights for design team into how customers were wearing/using garments and issues around quality

Future of Renew:

For all of their leftover scraps they are saving them until there is a recycling solution available
The designers have learnt from the fault data so they can design for circularity
Garment longevity has been improved

Waste no more

Waste no more was created for pieces beyond repair as raw material. An experimental design studio based in Irvington, NY. Led by Creative Director Sigi Ahl, the studio transforms damaged clothes into one-of-a-kind artworks, pillows, wall hangings and accessories using a custom felting technique that requires no water or dyes.

Eileen Fisher can now offer quantities to wholesale buyers based on the recorded inventory of donated garments.

COS Restore

In 2019 COS started partnering with The Renewal Workshop, mending damaged pieces. The Renewal Workshop is relatively small business, started in Oregon and now also working out of Amsterdam. COS offers 30% off original prices when you shop this collection and it is available in a few selected stores. For this line COS uses damaged pieces from it’s supply chain and returned faulty products. It is a huge step for major brands to find solutions for it’s faulty returns rather than wasting products, which are generally near perfect.

Wabi Sabi

In traditional Japanese aesthetics, Wabi-Sabi is a worldview centred on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete". This outlook views imperfections and uniqueness as beauty and celebrates the way items age over time. This concept has become popular over the past few years and is the key thinking we need to change the way consumers view their possessions.