With growing legislative scrutiny around the environmental impact of apparel production, circularity has emerged as a key solution for modern fashion supply chains. But what do we mean by a circular fashion industry? In the latest Beyond Threads webinar, our Circularity Lead, Nicole Bassett, explains what circularity means for fashion brands and offers concrete advice for implementing impactful strategies.
A strategy for sustainable growth
Circular fashion isn’t just an environmental necessity; it’s a strategic advantage for brands that want to remain competitive in a rapidly evolving market. As Nicole explains, adopting circular solutions can improve cost efficiency, unlock new revenue streams and help meet the growing consumer demand for sustainability – all while helping to preserve the planet’s finite resources.
Keeping products and resources in use
At its core, circular fashion is about extending the life cycle of garments and creating new business models by refurbishing, reselling and repairing damaged goods. “Brands no longer abandon responsibility once a product is sold,” says Nicole. “Instead, they focus on keeping products in use for as long as possible, reclaiming reusable materials, and minimising waste.”
And these circular strategies aren’t just good for the planet – they can also be great for business. Circular fashion can help brands to differentiate themselves, reduce costs, and meet growing consumer demand for eco-friendly products. Nicole highlights several success stories from leading brands like Levi’s and Christy Dawn, who’ve adopted successful circular strategies and are reaping the commercial rewards.
Changing your mindset to prioritise circularity
To successfully implement a circular fashion model, a shift in mindset is an essential first step. “The journey starts with educating yourself about what’s possible and learning which strategies will make an impact for your brand,” explains Nicole. “Small changes to production processes and product design – like using reusable materials or designing for repairability – can deliver significant results.”
In short, by rethinking the product lifecycle and committing to sustainability, brands can reduce their environmental footprint, build resilience, and capture new market opportunities.
Ready to take the next step on your circular journey? Watch our latest Beyond Threads webinar to get the insights you need to make circularity a reality for your brand.
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Transcript
Hi, welcome to this exciting episode of the Beyond Threads webinar. My name is Nicole Bassett, the Circularity Lead here at Bleckmann. Today we're going to deep-dive into circular fashion and talk about what is circularity, it's importance what is the impact of circularity, and how businesses are approaching this. So let's get started.
So we have to start where we are and that is on planet Earth. So nothing has left and nothing has come in. That means that the water that I'm drinking right now was once the water that dinosaurs were drinking. We have limits to our planet and so we have to start thinking about how do we operate inside of those limits.
So when we create pollution, where does it go?
It means when we use resources, how do they come back?
When we think about being on this planet, that we only have one planet and we all live on this planet this is how we start to think about how business should be done. From the 1800s business really started to change. We had the Industrial Revolution. That's when we started applying speed and scale to production. We started extracting at a rate more than ever before and we started exploiting not only people and the planet to create business. And where did that get us?
We do business today in a very similar way all over the world. We take raw materials, we make something out of them customers buy them and use them and then, usually at the end of that use, items get thrown away. We essentially take raw materials to create waste. This has huge problems, for us as humans and the planet. Environmentally, in the apparel industry, were either throwing away or burning a garbage truck of textiles every second.
In order to make those textiles, apparel, home goods usually it's women who are exploited, who work in harmful conditions and don't receive living wages. Economically, the apparel industry is also in a crisis. In order to grow revenue, brands have to make more things which creates overproduction. Overproduction requires brands to discount their product reducing profit margins, eroding the business that they assent to create.
But... there is an opportunity. And that is: shifting that business model from that linear 'take to waste' into one that is circular. Reuse resources wisely and we think about the business, the whole life cycle.
So what is circular fashion? So you can think of it as a system. We're going to design for circularity engage our customers in this process, use products multiple times repairing them, and then ultimately recycling textiles into new fibres to create new products. It's a new way of thinking about how the industry can work. It's not an easy transition going from linear to circular. It's a big shift. We've been doing business the way we have for 200 years and now we're going to ask everyone to do business differently? It's a big ask. So we're going to break down, what is a circular business what are the principles to look at, and how brands can take that information and shift their businesses.
I love starting with the Ellen MacArthur circular design principles. They're beautiful, perfect principles that you can ask yourself questions about as you're doing business to say: Am I on or off track around circularity? I'm going to break them down, but they are: design out waste and pollution, keep products and materials in use and regenerate natural capital. So let's start with designing out waste and pollution. As a designer every decision you make, you can create pollution or you can design out pollution all the way through the supply chain.
Every single decision has an impact.What materials you choose, how that material is created what happens at the end of use of that product. One example I really like is what Levi's took on in the early 2000s. They said, we're creating a lot of water pollution in the dyeing of our fabrics. So is there a way that we can look at the whole design process of creating fabrics and dyeing them and see how we can design out water effluence and pollution? And they created this amazing new process that has radically lowered the amount of water and water pollution in their products. They could do this because it was an intention and it was a design thought.
Keep products and materials in use. Over 70 per cent of the impact of a product comes from the making of it. So the best thing we can do is use it as long as possible. Luckily, there are lots of models that exist out there already. You are probably very familiar with not buying things, but actually renting them. Because you only need them for a short period of time. Or maybe you don't buy something that is brand new. You buy the used item. The other way to use materials is to recycle them. So designing materials so they actually can be taken through a technology and get used again is critical as we think about this design principle for circularity.
Another important element of how we think about materials can be seen through this very complex diagram also by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. It's called the Butterfly Diagram and in the blue we have technical nutrients. In the green we biological nutrients. Biological nutrients are easiest to be described like: you eat an apple and you throw it away, and it lands on the ground and the ground knows that when that apple decomposes it can absorb those nutrients, goes back into the soil and potentially grows another apple. Earth can absorb those materials. They are completely natural. The carbon is carbon no matter where you are. Technical nutrients, however, are man-made designed. That means that the earth actually has no idea what this is. You've probably heard of microplastics. Different ways in which plastics break down into the earth with no way of absorbing it, and that's pollution. See principle number one: we want to design out the pollution. So for using technical materials then we have to be able to recycle those so that we can reuse them again.
The last principle that I really like is to regenerate natural capital. So what this means is it's a real shift in business from this extraction mindset. 'I'm going to go farm and get the most I can out of that piece of land which means adding synthetic chemicals to it or exploiting labour to get the material out of that land.' Regenerating natural capital is about:
How do we put nutrients back in the soil?
How do we sequester carbon?
How do we regenerate and build new ecosystems inside of the soil?
One example I love is a company called Christy Dawn who has a relationship with their farmers in India where they actually pay the farmers a lot more, so that they can do rotation crops and have other materials be grown in that same area be it like legumes or other food along with the cotton. So that the cotton is not exploiting the earth at all. It's actually regenerating the biosphere right there. So there are a lot of benefits to a circular economy as you can probably see. There are a lot of benefits to circular fashion for brands. So hopefully you're taking notes and you're thinking about these things. One is that we're reducing waste. The other is that we're able to conserve resources. So if we're using resources over again we're getting the most out of the impact in creating that product the first time. And circular is really seen as a strategic move towards addressing your carbon impact. Because if we're using products more we don't have to use as much carbon to create those products in the first place. There's also a huge economic benefit to the circular economy for brands. There's cost efficiency in using materials more again. There is new business models: instead of just selling something once why not sell it 2 or 3 times? Why not rent it? Why not add services to your business?
And it provides a huge amount of resiliency to your business during supply chain disruptions. Circularity really does address a lot of key issues that the apparel industry is facing now. Alright, so hopefully as a company you're sold on the benefits of circularity. So what does this mean in practice? I'll break down a few of the areas in which brands are starting to look at the components of circularity. The first is collection. Most brands do not want their products back. But in a circular economy we want things to flow continuously. So collecting products back is critical.
The nice thing is that brands can use their logistics partners to help. They are already experts at reverse logistics and can bring products back. This could be through a trade-in programme or through returns. Ways in which you can get products back so that you can start to allocate them to their next best use. So one of those next best uses might be to renew the product and resell it generating new revenue off of your existing products. Maybe you've set up a rental programme and need to get those products back because someone else is waiting to get that product that they've just rented. Also, brands are starting to offer repair services. So I love my sweater, but it's got a hole in it. And instead of me tossing it out, I can get it repaired. Using that reverse logistics added with perhaps having a partner who knows how to do repairs, they do that, they fix it and your customers can be satisfied with the quality of the product they had and love, but also that you're servicing them over a long period of time.
The other key elements is around recycling. Unfortunately, today only one per cent of textiles are recycled back into new fibres or yarns. That's a huge opportunity for brands. There are recycling technologies available today, mostly mechanical but there is also a lot of cool innovation happening with chemical recycling. And so as brands design their products so they can come back those can go to that chemical recycler or mechanical recycler and get turned into new yarns. And that is where the brand can start to source their future products from. So if you are a brand and you are very interested in this and you want to know: What are my next steps, how do I get started?
The first thing is... guess what? Right where you are: get educated. Understand what this all means. What does it mean specifically for your brand? Because each brand is different. Your competitors will try various things. Some of it will make sense for you and some of it will not. So get educated on what is a circular economy, what does it mean and who is offering services that can help you. This may seem like a simple thing to say but it is the biggest challenge for most people, and that is mindset. Helping you change your company's mindset towards a circular business. Just imagine, everyone in the company is a professional at making and selling things, but they're not interested in having it come back. Now what we want to do is shift the mindset to say: actually, we want to do business differently. We want to design our products differently, we want to change our operations and logistics and we want to source our products in a different way, and that's a big change. And as we mostly know, change can be difficult and challenging. But if you get the whole team's mind around this opportunity you've handled the biggest challenge. Then it's time to get started.
The first is going to be around making your product circular. Looking at how to design it with those three principles of circularity in mind. Really getting the product set up for the future. Like adding a digital ID to your products so that your future selves know what the thing is that you created. Once that product is designed for circularity then you've got to design the business to support that systems change.
That means your sales have to change, your operations have to change. But once you've got that together, then it's magic. I always like to say that once you have a circular product that's that red dot in the middle you need a system in which to circulate that product. And hopefully that visual helps you think about how this would work. Okay, my design team has done the work. It's been designed so that I can resell it. It's been designed so I can repair it, so I can recycle it. Okay, now what is the system that has to be in place. So let's start with designing out waste and pollution. and the consumer is ready for this as well? It's a big shift, but the impact is huge. So in closing I'll just say, we can't keep doing business the way we used to. The linear model is broken. It does not serve us today.
The future has to be about thinking about: How do we operate business on a planet that is finite, where resources are finite where people and the environment cannot be exploited any longer? We can do business in a much more creative and exciting way. That's what the circular economy brings.
So as I said, education is the number one thing in your next steps. So tune in for the follow-on webinar with Hans Robben about circular operations. And please tune in to our podcast to learn even more details about how to bring your company into the circular fashion world. I'm Nicole Bassett, it was a pleasure being here with you today. For questions or more information please check out Bleckmann's website at bleckmann.com
