How refurbished clothes could become a thing

While the fast fashion industry is struggling to keep the hottest trends on the shelves, the outdoor fashion retailers are taking another angle. Companies like The North Face, REI, and Patagonia all sell high quality gear and clothing for those who love to play outdoors. Their customers also tend to be more environmentally conscious and don’t like the idea of their used shirts, boots, and pants winding up in a landfill simply because of a missing button or a busted zipper.

To address these concerns, The North Face has launched a recommerce program called The North Face Renewed. Here’s how it works… Renewed Gear is sent to The Renewal Workshop where the merchandise is cleaned and inspected. Then repairs are made such as stitching up a tear. Lastly, it is quality checked for The North Face standards and then placed online for resale. The North Face recognizes that 85% of textiles ends up in landfills and that is not a sustainable model for the planet. It is expected for this program to prove popular with their customers.

The North Face’s renewal campaign aligns with the growing secondary retail market. A recent Coresight Research report shows that the total U.S. apparel resale market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 13% from $18 billion in 2016 to $33 billion in 2021.

REI has also implemented programs that focus on the outdoors rather than commerce. The company’s anti-Black Friday #OptOutside campaign encouraged folks to enjoy the outdoors rather than shop. As a result, REI saw huge sales during its own blockbuster sales event, which takes place in May.

B-Stock was built on the idea that technology could revolutionize how organizations handle their obsolete inventory, including how to create a sustainable process for the last mile of the reverse supply chain: liquidation. By encouraging retailers and manufacturers to ditch traditional methods, including landfilling excess, obsolete, and returned product, and replacing that with a sustainable remarketing solution for inventory across all condition codes (including historically hard-to-sell merchandise like salvage or damaged), B-Stock has enabled the recycling, repurposing, reuse or resale of almost 300 million items.

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