We are a fairly new company but with high ambitions
RESPONSIBLE is a global circularity platform powered by advanced proprietary technology. The company aims to scale circularity by offering solutions across the product life cycle with a premium take on re-commerce. RESPONSIBLE partners with leading brands through a Buy Back loyalty programme; and a state-of-the-art refurbishment service that ensures the customer experience is as good as buying new. In an interview with Fibre2Fashion, CMO Ciaran Jordan talks about bringing circularity in the fashion industry.
Why is circularity important when it comes to clothing?
We are in the middle of a climate crisis. Fashion is a big contributor to this. With its current processes for material extraction, textile production, design, manufacturing, sales, marketing, and end-of-life, the fashion industry is responsible for 10 per cent of all humanity’s carbon emissions.
By focusing on extending the longevity and life cycle of products we can reduce the negative impact on our planet. According to Wrap, adding just nine extra months of active use would reduce the carbon, water, and waste footprints of the products by around 20-30 per cent each.
What are the different ways of promoting circularity in the fashion industry?
For fashion to become circular, we need to design out waste and pollution, keep materials and products in use for longer, and close the loop to feed back into the design phase, so that materials and products never become waste. Brands need quick and easy solutions to implement circular business models and customers need convenient and appealing options to mend, resell or buy second hand and recycle their clothes.
What inspired the founding of RESPONSIBLE? What are the key objectives and goals?
Fashion has a sustainability problem. The fashion industry manufactures billions of items each year. According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, only 5-7 per cent of these clothes are sold for a second time, which is a missed opportunity of $560 billion of value annually. And a waste for our planet’s resources. Our founders Mark Dowds and Mitchell Doust wanted to build a solution to solve this issue by offering new technology and solutions across the entire product life cycle to keep fashion in rotation and enable more sustainable choices. Both come from the tech and finance space where they already solved problems by new innovations and have successfully scaled solutions. That is why RESPONSIBLE has a strong tech foundation from the start.
The founding was almost two years ago, and since then we have been striving to make circularity in fashion the new norm and bring more and more brands and retail stores on board. We help them to implement circular business models like a re-commerce programme fast and easily. We take care of refurbishing and re-selling used products, claims, returns, and deadstock. Together with our partners, we turn used fashion items into a resource and generate additional revenue from products that otherwise would go to waste.
What is the role of technology in enabling circularity, and how do you plan to leverage technology to achieve its goals?
Technology will be key for transforming the fashion industry. Through technology and data, we can enable brands to become accountable for everything they produce and at the same time benefit financially from a more circular and sustainable business model. At RESPONSIBLE, we are using tech to remove friction from implementing circular business models for brands. Our proprietary tech solutions enable quick digitisation and a sophisticated understanding of price and cost structures for secondhand products. It helps us figure out what a product is, what we can afford to trade it for, what it will cost to repair, and what we should price it at to ensure it sells through. Because only profitable business models will have a chance for a widespread adoption throughout the fashion industry.
We are also using tech to reduce friction for consumers by enabling shopping experiences that are as convenient as buying new fashion products. For example, we have a WhatsApp service where customers can directly get in contact with our team about products they would like to trade in or buy from us.
How does RESPONSIBLE partner with brands to drive circularity across the product life cycle?
We are working with our brand partners to set up a circularity strategy and implement circular business models fast and easy. For example, we built a service called Buy Back, a stand-alone web application to integrate into brand partners’ shops. It enables customers to trade in used products to give them a second life. Behind the scenes is the RESPONSIBLE platform, assessing the product, issuing return shipping instructions, and eventually credit that can be used on the brand partners’ store. Throughout our refurbishment process, we are collecting data which we share with our partners’ design teams to raise material production quality and create products that can easily be repaired, resold or recycled.
What is the process of refurbishing items at RESPONSIBLE, and how does it contribute to reducing waste and promoting sustainability?
Items brought in for trade are sanitised, cleaned, and if necessary repaired, so each piece feels brand new. For example, we use ozone-cleaning, a low-temperature disinfectant and odour-removing treatment that can increase textile longevity by up to three times. The next customer receives the refurbished product that is resold via the brand partners’ shop, third-party platforms, or the RESPONSIBLE reCommerce store in minimal, plastic-free packaging. Our aim is that no products processed by us end up in landfills, but are refurbished, recycled or upcycled. We have also worked with our brand partners like HELIOT EMIL or Cote & Ciel on insightful upcycling projects.
What types of items does RESPONSIBLE refurbish, and how do you ensure the quality of the products?
Our team refurbishes fashion clothing and accessories, and we will extend this to shoes soon. Due to a strong ecosystem of refurbishment experts, we can also accept even heavily used products and make them as good as new.
How do you ensure that the customer experience of refurbished products is on par with that of new items?
We want to set a new bar for secondhand products. Therefore, we have a premium approach for everything we do. We strive to be as close to a brand’s product as the original design team: understanding the importance of details – right down to the stitching. Our customers get high-quality verified and expert-repaired, steamed, and pressed products from their favourite brands that look on-brand in our shop and feel fresh and clean when they arrive. With a focus on engaging content, plastic-free packaging and excellent customer service we are premiumising secondhand retail.
What kind of data do you collect during the refurbishment process, and how does it inform the design and production of new products?
In a circular fashion world, products need to be designed to be repairable, resellable, and recyclable. We help our partners understand how they can do this. During our refurbishment process, we capture 164 data points on every garment providing real-world insight into how products fail and where refurbishment costs lie. We offer this insight back to our brand partners so that they can improve product quality. This is a very insightful process for us and our brand partners, and it is a journey.
What has been the biggest challenge that RESPONSIBLE has faced since its launch, and how have you overcome it?
Making fashion circular is a long effort as it involves a business model change and engages the entire value chain. New solutions need to be built and scaled. This makes our journey challenging and with different stakes every day.
Especially in the recycling industry there is a lot to do. We need to find processes for recycling and best-case upcycling garments and make it a day-to-day reality for all brands working in fashion.
How do you measure RESPONSIBLE’s impact on reducing waste and promoting circularity in the fashion industry?
We are a fairly new company but with high ambitions. Since our launch in 2021, we have received and rescued over 10,000 pieces from landfills. With the recent acquisition of another company Haru, we want to increase this number substantially. We have a growing number of brand partners with whom we want to accelerate the circular transition in fashion.
What are some of the long-term goals and aspirations for RESPONSIBLE, both in terms of business growth and environmental impact?
We set ourselves short- and long-term goals. Short term goals are to scale our re-commerce solution with more brand partners and help raise product quality in the design stage of our partners. We are also working on country expansion to enter markets like the US and to include new categories like footwear. In the longer term we work on building more technology, innovative processes and circular concepts to cover all stages of the product life cycle and help our partners to lessen their environmental impact.
How do you plan to engage with and educate consumers about the importance of circular fashion, and encourage them to participate in circularity efforts?
We want to help shoppers extend the life of their most loved items and make it a default option to invest in good quality items, repair them, resell them and recycle them so that it can be remade into new clothing. For example, we engage shoppers in our Buy Back process already at the point of purchase. When shopping for a new product they get informed about the buyback price they will receive in case they want to trade the item back to the brand. This way we help shoppers see the product more as an investment instead of a throwaway piece.
Interviewer: Shilpi Panjabi
Published on: 04/04/2023
DISCLAIMER: All views and opinions expressed in this column are solely of the interviewee, and they do not reflect in any way the opinion of Fibre2Fashion.com.
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