Textile's second life — recommerce, sorting, recycling.

I ran it by hand, so I know exactly how much work it costs:

Every returned item had to be received, inspected, assessed for condition, sometimes washed, then described, photographed, priced and listed — all of it manual, all of it by me. That works at the scale of one small brand and collapses immediately above it. Every step of the reverse logistics process carries cost.

Honest about the size of it:

At my scale, take-back is closer to sustainability marketing than to a business model. There simply aren't enough Arctic Flamingos out there to build a business case on resale alone. Through our second-hand shop, we found a new owner for over 500 unique items.

Why this makes me useful:

I've been on both sides of a garment's life. I chose the fibre, wrote the product data, sold the item to the customer, took it back years later, and decided what it was still worth. The same garment, both ends. That's the loop most people only ever see one segment of. It means I understand why people return things and what they expect in exchange, where the bottlenecks in a take-back and resale programme actually sit, and which parts of this work are worth automating versus which only look that way in a demo.

The question I keep coming back to thinking about the big scale of recommerce:

How do you identify a garment and assess its condition at scale — and how much of that can genuinely be automated? Machine vision for fibre identification and defect detection. Condition grading against a consistent standard, instead of one tired person's judgement at 4pm. Automatically generated listings and data-driven pricing, so the handling cost stops eating the item's value. And with digital product passports coming through EU regulation, the identification question may at least get answered upstream — though only for what's made from now on, and never for condition.