Our Mission
End fashion waste by empowering people to maximise the value of everything they buy.
Fashion retail is ready for a transformation. Retailers today have one primary goal: To sell you as many clothes as possible. Once you walk out the door, their job is done, and the only time you hear from them again is when they want to sell you even more clothes.
The result is a massive waste of both money and resources. The clothes you drop in the collection or rubbish bin every year are actually worth over £300 per household (£400-500 billion per year globally), and around 85% of them end up in landfill (over 80 billion garments worldwide).
At Stilbaar, we’re dedicated to redefining the fashion shopping experience. Our simple pledge is that we buy back every single garment for store credit as soon as you’re done using it, regardless of condition. We then resell or regenerate every garment.
The result? You receive the current market value of every garment you buy from us, effortlessly. And absolutely none of those garments will ever see landfill.
Stilbaar is a proud member of The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, the global leader in circular economy research and education.
We previously helped major brands such as Adidas and John Lewis enable instant sell-back from their customers, setting records for product recirculation in the process (you can read about our predecessor company, Stuffstr, here). We saw first-hand how excited shoppers became when they realised they could sell back any purchase both instantly and effortlessly. Our experiences inspired us to create Stilbaar.
Stilbaar replaces the goal of selling you as many clothes as possible with a much richer goal: Maximising the value of everything you buy.
Meet Sandrine Kockum, the heart and soul of Stilbaar
Sandrine is a Swedish/French national who grew up in Switzerland. Here she talks about the origins of Stilbaar, how Stilbaar was reborn in its current form, and what makes Stilbaar so different from other fashion sites.
Where does the name ‘Stilbaar’ come from?
Stilbaar is a mix between the Swedish words “stil”, which means style, and “hållbar”, which means sustainable. The idea is that you don't have to compromise your style in order to be sustainable.
What was the original focus of Stilbaar?
Stilbaar started in 2020 as a sustainable fashion e-commerce platform. The original idea was to offer a handpicked selection of small sustainable designers which you couldn't find on any other e-commerce sites. I handpicked each brand based on criteria such as their production process, the material chosen, the design and style of each product. Most of the brands were women-led, so supporting women and small businesses was also a key focus of Stilbaar.
What led to Stilbaar’s transformation into the site we see today?
After running Stilbaar for a few years, I encountered some health issues, so I decided to pull back from running the site 24/7 and focus on being a very present mom to my young children. Not too long after, I was introduced to John Atcheson (Co-Founder/CEO of Circular Way) through a mutual friend and we immediately clicked. I was swept away by the vision of full circularity, and the impact it could have on our planet. I was also impressed by the experience and dedication of John and his Co-Founder/CTO, James Pamplin. John and James have a lot of experience in circularity through their previous company, Stuffstr, where they won the 2020 World Retail Award for Retail Technology Game-Changer by helping brands like Adidas and John Lewis buy back and resell used clothes at record levels. They also have a long-standing affiliation with The Ellen MacArthur Foundation where they've gotten to know many of the foundational players in the circular economy.
All of that convinced me to sell my company and join them so I could focus on what I love the most, which is selecting the brands/products for our site and working on all design aspects of the company as well as marketing.
What makes Stilbaar unique?
Stilbaar offers a whole new way of shopping. Even the retailer with the most respected, long-standing resale programme in the fashion industry buys back only 1-2% of the clothes they sell, and they only accept clothes in like-new condition. Our goal at Stilbaar is to buy back 100% of the clothes we sell, regardless of condition. We then resell them if possible, and if they’re no longer wearable, we regenerate them into new garments. We do this by treating every garment we sell as currency towards your next purchase. You can even use previous purchases to pay for new clothes during checkout, all at the tap of a button. We then help you get as much value as possible after your purchase. We help you repair your clothes, stay on top of their current value, and even optionally keep track of where and when you wore them.
Ultimately, we make money not by selling as many new clothes as we can but by helping you get as much value as possible from every garment we sell. Our hope is that, by setting an example and making it simple for people to get much better value from their clothes, every retailer will ultimately operate just like we do.
