Customers can sell old clothing back to the British high street giant using the social enterprise app Stuffstr. The mobile device will calculate the amount a seller will receive for their old items, and once they have amassed the amount of £50 or over, a courier will collect the pieces from their home. The customer will then receive a John Lewis e-gift card for the amount of the items sold.
“We felt Stuffstr offered a unique solution to this particular issue, which shows people the value of items they no longer wear, and encourages them to change their habits to buy high quality items which last a long time,” John Lewis sustainability manager, Martyn White, told Vogue of the pilot, which the retailer has been working on for months.
Items bought back will be resold, mended for resale or recycled into new products, with White ambitious about the latter option. “An unwanted item can be made into a new clothing item,” he said.
The clothing initiative follows John Lewis’s wider efforts to increase in-house sustainability. Last year, the brand took back more than 27,000 electrical products and 2,000 used sofas for upcycling, and recycled materials from 55,000 mattresses, according to The Guardian.
The initiative is the first of its kind to offer a financial incentive to customers who engage in an “end to end” fashion system, where garments are used for longer and then made into new products at the end of their first life cycle. M&S launched its schwopping scheme in 2012, and H&M and Zara have since introduced in-store recycling bins, but the industry needs to paint a clearer vision of what a circular economy looks like, and why it’s essential. Currently, 87 percent of fashion gets landfilled or incinerated, according to statistics revealed at the Copenhagen Fashion Summit, a huge problem when we consider that we have doubled the amount of clothes we produce in the last 15 years.
For White, the fact that every single item of clothing, be it a sock or piece of underwear, has value is a no-brainer. “If it cannot be re-sold or mended and re-sold, it can be made into a new item,” he states. It’s our job as consumers to buy into this sustainable message.
The clothing initiative follows John Lewis’s wider efforts to increase in-house sustainability. Last year, the brand took back more than 27,000 electrical products and 2,000 used sofas for upcycling, and recycled materials from 55,000 mattresses, according to The Guardian.
The initiative is the first of its kind to offer a financial incentive to customers who engage in an “end to end” fashion system, where garments are used for longer and then made into new products at the end of their first life cycle. M&S launched its schwopping scheme in 2012, and H&M and Zara have since introduced in-store recycling bins, but the industry needs to paint a clearer vision of what a circular economy looks like, and why it’s essential. Currently, 87 percent of fashion gets landfilled or incinerated, according to statistics revealed at the Copenhagen Fashion Summit, a huge problem when we consider that we have doubled the amount of clothes we produce in the last 15 years.
For White, the fact that every single item of clothing, be it a sock or piece of underwear, has value is a no-brainer. “If it cannot be re-sold or mended and re-sold, it can be made into a new item,” he states. It’s our job as consumers to buy into this sustainable message.
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