Re-Fashion’s intention to be ‘the Asos of charity shopping’

Founded in 2018, Re-Vogue is a 2nd-hand apparel web site. Members of the public order a donation bag on-line, declutter their wardrobe and write-up the bag back to Re-Manner for totally free. Merchandise are then bought on Re-Fashion’s web site and the funds elevated can help fund sustainable manner assignments.

The site encourages customers to reuse, remake and maintenance dresses. In October Re-Trend launched its initially consider-again scheme with a fashion retailer – Incredibly – to lower apparel waste and trend merchandise currently being sent to landfill.

Re-Vogue co-founder Steve Lyons talks to Drapers about deliver charity buying on-line.

How did the Re-Vogue idea appear about?

I’ve labored in many roles in the charity sector over the previous decade and five decades ago I established up 3 charity outlets for British Cancer Care. We realised pretty rapidly that physical retailers ended up minimal in terms of how a great deal product or service they can sell compared with how a lot solution is donated to them.

As a bricks-and-mortar retailer, there are only a certain quantity of individuals walking into a store to provide it to. They have to rotate stock each and every couple of months and then market the residual stock to recycling providers, which ship it abroad for reuse. I questioned how can we make the program more present day and far more efficient and how can we get extra of the product or service sold. We decided to just take it on line.

How does Re-Vogue operate?

Our target is to find a reuse for the product we get in. At the minute we sell 70%, and people products that we cannot provide, we provide to our escalating upcycling community. We offer solutions in 2kg luggage at expense – to encourage people today to create their have special goods. Our goal is to produce a 1st-course consumer experience. It is not like rummaging about in a charity store – it’s like acquiring from Asos, the place you can select what you want and it will be sent the up coming working day with a no-quibble, free of charge-returns policy.

We advertise on Fb and Instagram for donations, and our market place leans towards millennials. They like the simple fact that they can get a donation bag on the web, they like that they can fill it up and consider it to their returns depot for free, and they like the actuality that dollars is heading to charity. It makes the charity donation working experience present day for the up coming generation.

At the second we’re doing the job mainly with charities focused on sustainability together with The Restore Store, Tiny Hands Style and the Rieves Foundation. We give at the very least 20% of the gross sales to charities. Which is much more than they make web from proudly owning and running a charity shop, and that’s devoid of the possibility, stress or the fiscal stress of hire.

Notify us far more about the partnership with Extremely

We see this as the up coming stage in Re-Manner. The Incredibly Team has been wonderful to function with, and there is a genuine sense that they want to go higher than and further than a standard consider-back scheme, in which several vendors have no sight on exactly where the solution ends up [in landfill, for example]. Extremely will introduce its prospects by means of e-mail to Re-Style, inviting them to request a donation bag that can be stuffed with good-high quality garments and returned totally free of cost to us.

We make it as uncomplicated as doable for partners to perform with us. They can utilise their buyer foundation by means of mail communications, and they can use their distribution base for luggage likely out and in, but in the end we can get the products in, we method it, we selling price it, we photograph it, we listing it and we sell it. We’re talking to four other big merchants in the British isles, and we’ll offer you them all some thing customized to their style and their products and solutions.

Do you believe greenwashing is a issue in the style field?

I’m guaranteed greenwashing has been a stage of point more than the previous few of a long time in fashion but I’m not absolutely sure if it’s at any time deliberate. I never consider any individual intentionally greenwashes simply because they just can’t be bothered [to invest the time and resources in sustainability] – they were being accomplishing what they could at the time.

The extra artistic and engaged the marketplace gets, the more that will enhance. Now that sustainability is turning out to be a lot more commercially sensitive, a lot more merchants and models are having it very seriously. The extra one retailer does, the additional the up coming one wants to aspire to – no a person needs to get still left powering.

Does the govt want to get additional involved with regulating sustainability in style?

We continue to set a billion things in landfill each individual 12 months and without having any one realising it we’re shipping at the very least half a billion goods overseas – and some of it is likely into some other country’s landfill, no doubt. The govt can assist with education: how do you increase the product or service at resource, how do you lower water usage and chemical pollution, how do you increase how persons are treated. These are government instruction parts.

The governing administration also wants to encourage innovation in sustainability with subsidies to seriously obtain an conclusion remedy to making use of just about every component of what’s developed – but I do see that occurring.