🌱 Fashion's Financial Frontiers: How Early Majority's membership drove 24% of revenue in its first month, and 5 partners to scale your resale.

Featuring SOJO, The North Face, Levi's, Asket, IKEA and more...

Jan 29, 2024

Happy Monday!

This week we cover:

Quick Take: Resale for Scale: Five Partners Offering Stress-Free Sustainability
Brand Spotlight: Early Majority: Rethinking Fashion, Redefining Membership
In case you missed it: Why Asket paused the release of new products, and we dig into degrowth ahead of Earth Overshoot Day.

WAIT! We’re compiling a list of CPG x sustainability events for February. Want us to include yours? Let us know before Wednesday!

> Good News Last Week

🎯 SOJO, the clothing repair and alteration platform, announced they are B Corp certified, achieving a score of 86.8 points. On top of their new status, the company announced they will also have a permanent concession at Selfridges following the success of their month-long pop-up in 2023.

🎯 Grubby reported that their 55,200 meals sold in January thus far have saved 117 500 kgCO2e compared to the meat equivalent meals, measured by My Emissions. They also reported seeing an interest in meat alternative recipes from their consumers.

🎯 Aleph Farms received regulatory approval from the Ministry of Health Israel to produce the world’s first cultivated beef steaks. The steaks are the first non-chicken cultivated meat to receive this status.

⭐️ Too Good To Go launched their AI-powered platform which will allow supermarkets to sell their food products nearing their expiry dates. The surplus food management platform will suggest discount rates of food products and factor in consumer preferences, aiming to reduce supermarket food waste. Spar will be the first global supermarket chain to implement the platform following a successful trial at a French supermarket chain.

⭐️ BASF and Inditex announced the launch of their loopamid material, made from 100% textile waste - a first for nylon clothing. Zara has produced a jacket made from the material with all inputs - fabric, buttons, filling, zipper - being made with loopamid.

⭐️ IKEA released their FY23 Sustainability Report reporting a 12% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions along their value chain from 2022, and a 22% reduction of the total IKEA climate footprint in absolute terms compared to their FY16 baseline year.

> Want good news sooner? We post every Friday on LinkedIn! If your CPG brand has good news to share, let us know.

> Quick Take

Resale for Scale: Five Partners Offering Stress-Free Sustainability

Textile professionals - how are you holding up? Garment industry emissions have been pretty grim, as of late. We imagine that extending the life of fabric goods is top of mind for all you newsletter readers, given that ‘of the 100 billion garments produced each year, 92 million tons end up in landfills’. If business as usual continues, global apparel emissions are predicted to double by 2030. It’s time for solutions!

So, what can well-intentioned textile and apparel brands do?

If you are a Depop, Poshmark, eBay, Vestaire or The RealReal fan, like many of us Following the Footprints members, you have observed the notably Gen Z-driven secondhand revolution; in fact ‘the global secondhand market is expected to surge at three times the rate of the overall global apparel market up to 2027’. As Gen Z purchasing power grows, now is the perfect time to set your brand up for success by:

Reducing emissions and curbing overproduction; ideally, customers will continue to see the value of shopping secondhand and brands with strong resale strategies will be most resilient.
Owning your brand’s resale revenue and maintaining brand image; establishing your own resale channel allows you to profit from secondhand sales and eventually make that a core business pillar.

Rather than enter the world of resale alone, working with an established branded resale partner can significantly reduce the barrier to entry, logistical headaches, and uphold an excellent customer experience. The outlook is promising, according to Trove; ‘by 2040, resale initiatives have the potential to lower annual carbon emissions for these brands by 15-16%’.

*A Trove-powered resale experience for REI. Source: trove.com*

Here are five resale partners to give your garments new life:

Trove: After closing a $30m series E in late summer of 2023, Trove has big expansion and technological development goals. They’re an established business and offer their partners like Lululemon, REI, Levi’s, Patagonia and Arc’teryx branded storefronts and handle the entire logistical lifecycle from trade-in to AI quality assessments and intelligent pricing, including proprietary warehousing.
Archive: Another platform boasting a star-studded partner roster like The North Face, Sandro, and Oscar De La Renta, Archive focuses on agility and enables brands to have a secondhand solution active within months with (almost) no code required. They also offer similar AI-powered capabilities to Trove and handle warehousing with resale logistics partners or by enabling clients to establish their own warehouses.
Recurate: Our third up-and-comer in the resale market, Recurate, was founded in 2020 and already has established partnerships with the likes of Steve Madden, Mara Hoffman, and Michael Kors. Similar to Trove and Archive, they offer end-to-end support; in 2023 they hired a new VP of Engineering with 20+ years of experience at Fortune 500 companies, so you can expect even more technical sophistication.
Reskinned: UK-based Reskinned takes a different approach by focusing on a takeback model and directly offering upcycling and recycling services. All of their brand partners like Sweaty Betty, Finisterre and ONE Essentials can be shopped on the Reskinned website.
reverse.supply: To close us out, all-in-one-re-commerce solution reverse.supply serves the European market and has partners such as Globetrotter and Armedangels. Like others on this list, they facilitate the entire re-selling process so your time is not spent on secondhand quality evaluations or warehouse snags.

Are you already working with a re-commerce platform and want to share your experience? Let us know! We’d love to spread the intel throughout the FTF community.

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Early Majority: Rethinking Fashion, Redefining Membership

While fast fashion and overconsumption are still predominant, one brand is on a mission to reshape the way we think about outdoor apparel. Early Majority has redefined the typical purcha§se model with the introduction of a subscription-based model - exemplifying their commitment to prioritise people over products.

A Shift Towards Sustainable Consumption

Early Majority, founded by Joy Howard (the former global marketing vice president at Patagonia), has been designated ‘Fashion’s first degrowth brand’ by Vogue. The company's commitment to ethical practices and environmental responsibility is evident in every stitch of their versatile outdoor apparel. All pieces are carefully designed and crafted to cater for changing personal needs - removable hoods for different hairstyles and A-line zips allowing women to wear the clothes during pregnancy, are just a few of the design details. The brand creates modular and lifetime pieces, allowing for the fewest number of clothing items with maximum iterations.

Beyond Transactions

Fostering a philosophy of less is more, the brand incorporates sustainability into every decision. One of these key business decisions is to create a membership model. Their innovative model embodies Early Majority's approach to fashion anchored on working with their customers to understand their needs, simultaneously reducing waste and overproduction. Membership not only offers exclusive access to products (both new and renewed) and reduced price, it also opens up dialogue between the brand and its members. This two-way engagement enables feedback, suggestions, and a collaborative effort to shape the brand's future. The brand incentivises membership purchase as this helps the company produce less so that the products can be sold for less. This model is proving successful, generating 24% of their revenue in it’s first month alone.

There are two membership categories: annual and lifetime. Annual membership comes with discounted prices, priority access, and online journal access, while lifetime membership additionally comes with an NFT badge that grows in value as the company grows. This approach is a breath of fresh air in an industry notorious for its disconnected relationship with consumers.

Debuting with Purpose

Early Majority's debut collection in April 2022 consisted of only nine products, which was an important milestone. Exploring the fascinating world of Early Majority, it's evident that this brand is not just selling clothes; they are building a community of like-minded individuals who share a commitment to sustainability and conscious consumerism. In an era where overconsumption is the norm, Early Majority is setting a precedent for a more mindful, community-driven approach to fashion. Let’s join the movement.