Circular fashion is more than throwing clothes in a recycling bin or reselling things occasionally. It is an end-to-end system where all clothes are used fully, reclaimed and regenerated into new clothes.
Sadly, fashion today is a million miles away from this ideal. A typical garment is worn only seven times, 85% of clothes end up in landfill, and less than 1% of clothes are regenerated into new clothes. Making fashion circular requires bold, transformational change.
At Stilbaar, we see this challenge as an enormous opportunity. Significant technological advancements in the past few years have made it possible to sell and use clothes in a completely new way — a way that significantly benefits everyone who buys clothes (i.e., all of us).
The key rests in giving every garment an ongoing value, and empowering people to capture that value both instantly and effortlessly. To make that possible requires clothes to be sold in a completely new way, where the focus is not on selling as many new clothes as possible, but rather on maximising the value of every garment sold. This is what drove us to create Stilbaar.
Stilbaar includes several wholly new shopping experiences:
- Guaranteed sell-back of every garment, regardless of condition
- Instant store credit — use previous purchases as real-time currency to buy new clothes
- Fully free and facilitated return of all sold-back items
- An NFC chip embedded in every garment to provide a host of after-sale services, including:
- Garment information and history
- Current sell-back price
- One-tap sell-back
- Repair
- Integrated services (for example, optional calendar integration to auto-record days you've worn your garment and with whom)
- Side-by-side sales of new and refurbished versions of the same garment
The result is a continuously flowing system where the value of every garment is maximised throughout and waste is reduced to zero. When garments reach the point at which they can't be refurbished any more, we send them to specialised textile-to-textile recyclers such as Evrnu or Circ, who turn them into new fabrics. Importantly, we only sell garments that are optimised for these processes — pure cotton, linen, modal, etc. — and avoid plastics-based fibres altogether due to the microplastics they emit.
The benefits to you of shopping at Stilbaar are dramatic. Not only do you get much higher value from every garment you buy, but you can also rest assured you’re shopping in the most sustainable way possible.
If you'd like to learn more about circularity, we highly recommend visiting the website of The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which is the global leader in circular economy research and education.
