A San Francisco-based menswear brand adopts an eco-friendly approach in its business. The company calls it a repair program. As reported by Esha Chhabra for Forbes, Taylor Stitch has been adopting and advocating for eco-friendly business for the last 12 years. However, the co-founder said that more things still had to be done to realize environmentally friendly business, particularly in garment industry, which is associated with the issues of landfills.

Taylor Stitch’s Program for Eco-Friendly Business

The newest program from Taylor Stitch is called Restitch. As the name suggests, the program allows the company to transform used clothing items into new saleable ones. Taylor Stitch collaborates with Yerdle, a startup that is backed up by some brands like Eileen Fisher or REI. The principle of Restitch program is giving old clothes a new life. Here is how the program works:

• The customers send used clothes to Yerdle
• The customers then get another garment from Taylor Stitch. The garment can be new or used one.
• Then, Taylor Stitch and Yerdle patch, repair, or re-stitch the used garment into resellable products.

The two companies can take any types of clothing except footwear and T-shirts, as they are hard to repair. Taylor Sticth and Yerdle have received about 1500 garments for repair. They re-stitch the used clothing into two categories. The first one is vintage collection, which includes premium resellable products. Then, the remaining garments go into Restitch program.

Under the new program, the two partner companies want to show that old, worn clothes do not have to meet the end of their life immediately. Things can be done to use them repeatedly as an effort of reducing environmental impacts brought about by the garment industry. The same clothes can be worn by different person as they are transformed into new ones. At the same time, they are kept out of the landfill.

The Concept behind Eco-Friendly Business by Taylor Stitch

Taylor Stitch has special concerns about the environmental aspect of garment industry. Studies show that average Americans throw away about 80 pounds of clothing every year. As the new fashion mode comes, they throw out the old ones. New garments certainly have carbon, material, and water footprint, while the old ones end up in the landfill.

Actually, some programs of reusing old garments, particularly denim, had been introduced. However, most of them were not cost effective and resource effective enough. Taylor Stitch focuses on repurposing concept: the old ones are transformed into new ones with different purposes. The company focuses on responsibility, instead of sustainability, term to describe its business. Sustainability has been so commonly used in business practice as a thinly veiled marketing jargon.

Of course, Taylor Stitch is still faced with many challenges, particularly since it is running a small brand and collaborating with startups. However, the progress is promising as the brand helps in addressing environmental problems. It also has a bigger vision for the future. Instead of using re-cycled fibers, Taylor Stitch is visioning using renewed fibers. In this way, the old clothes are turned into new materials instead of new, repaired clothes.