[TEASER]
What I like about what we’re doing is taking responsibility for what we made in the first place. It would be nice to see other brands feeling responsible for what you created.
[Music up and under, Winning by EJ Cali]
[INTRO]
0:14 Welcome back to Relentless, a podcast about the pursuit of unusual aspirations, farfetched ideas, or that perfect pair of sneakers. I’m the host Maddy Russell-Shapiro. This season, we’re exploring ethical fashion and we started with a behind-the-scenes look at one clothing company, Noah. If you haven’t listened to that five-party story yet, I encourage you to do so. For the remainder of the season, we’re featuring interviews with other people in the fashion world who are concerned about improving the industry’s supply chain in ways that are better for people and planet.
Reports suggest that 85% of clothing ends up in landfills when it is discarded. 85%. I find that statistic disturbing. And since there are viable alternatives to landfill, I wanted to learn more about what else can be done with used clothes.
[Music fades out]
At the company Eileen Fisher, there is a program called Renew. It is the company’s commitment to taking responsibility for the full life cycle of all the clothes it produces. How many brands that you wear will take back their clothes when you no longer want them? Eileen Fisher will, no matter what the condition.
Eileen Fisher is headquartered in Irvington, New York, a quaint town on the Hudson River, about an hour north of New York City by train. The Renew program is housed in what the company calls its Tiny Factory. [Music, Moonlight by DJ Synchro, underneath] It was there, a five-minute walk uphill from the train station, that I met 33-year-old Cynthia Power on a cool, sunny, fall day.
1:42 Cynthia: I’m Cynthia Power. I am the director of Eileen Fisher Renew, and I am 33 years old. [Music fades out] Renew is Eileen Fisher’s take-back, resale and reuse program and I oversee the program: the budget, the teams, the stores, and make sure the project and little business that it is, as a whole, is happy and healthy. Renew has been around for ten years, it started under the name Green Eileen as part of our company foundation and then moved into the company halfway through the ten years. We take back our clothes. We say we want all our clothes back. To date, we’ve taken back 1.3 million Eileen Fisher garments and counting. Its purpose is really to keep Eileen Fisher clothes in use. We spent a lot of money and resources getting these clothes made in the first place. We use extremely high-quality fibers. We make durable and timelessly designed clothes. The best thing is to have them be worn as long as possible, and then beyond that, have them used as fabric or fiber for as long as possible. We also bring in a new customer to the company and help make Eileen Fisher accessible to a lot more women, or people, who can’t afford a full-price product, but could afford a second-hand garment.
3:05 Maddy: The company has been around since 1984, it’s 2019, this program since 2009. What does 1.3 million pieces of clothing represent in terms of how much clothes total has been produced in ten years or how much Eileen Fisher clothing exists in the world?
Cynthia: Some very rough back-of-the-envelope math: I think probably we’ve made 50 million garments in time since the company has been around, roughly. And we’ve taken back 1.3, so that’s about 2.5% of the total of everything we’ve ever made, very approximately. To put that in a different perspective, every year the company produces between four and five million garments; last year Renew brought back 220,000 pieces. It’s roughly three to four percent of what we’re making every year.
[Music, Moonlight by DJ Synchro, underneath]
3:56 Are you wondering what that looks like in practice? Come with me inside the Tiny Factory. In certain areas, as you’ll hear, there are air circulation systems that are quite loud. My tour started in the Renew store, an Eileen Fisher shop open to the public where the entire inventory is second-hand. [Music fades out]
Maddy: Will you set the scene for us?
Cynthia: Sure. We are in our Irvington store and warehouse. In our warehouse, we take back all our Eileen Fisher clothing and in our store we resell second-hand Eileen Fisher. We have two warehouses; we’re in one of them now. The other one is in Seattle where we also have another Renew store. There’s nothing new here. Cardigans, sweaters, dresses. We do have a special product category, “not quite perfect,” which are pieces that have slight flaws, so you might find a little hole or stain, so they’re priced lower than everything else, but we still think they’re wearable and beautiful so we sell them.
Maddy: This part is open to the public, but there is a lot more here. Let’s go!
Cynthia: Wanna see the warehouse?
Maddy: Yeah!
[Music, Moonlight by DJ Synchro, underneath]
Cynthia: Ok. [walking into sorting space] Morning, Iris, hi, Peter, this is Maddy.
5:04 We’re in a large room flooded with natural light and full of clothes hanging on racks, piled in in bins, boxes, and on work tables.
[Music fades out]
Maddy: I see signs: laundry, mending, sorting.
Cynthia: We’re in our warehouse. I was just talking to Peter, he is one of our warehouse associates. Sorts through everything received from stores. The way it works, anyone with Eileen Fisher clothing can take it back to any US store, and we give a $5 gift card in exchange for the item. The item can be perfect, wearable, brand new, or shredded to pieces.
[Music, Moonlight by DJ Synchro, underneath]
Maddy: Some of your favorite things that have come back?
Cynthia: I’ve seen a sweater come back like that, long beautiful wool cardigan, more hole than sweater. The staff and teas mention what comes back in the pockets: rosary beads, or a room card from spa in Brazil, or eyeglasses, dog treats. [laughs]
[Music fades out]
Cynthia: All the stores send all those items to one of our two warehouses. They show up in boxes every day. Peter, how many boxes today? 16 boxes yesterday. Is that low or high? Normal. 16 boxes is average. Each one has 50-ish garments in it, 50 to 70 garments. We sort into categories of is this still perfect or not-perfect? If it’s perfect, then it goes into the sweater bin, fall bin, or spring bin. We sort it, we clean it, then we send it out to be resold in one of our stores. If it’s damaged, we still clean it and figure out what to do with it.
[Music, Moonlight by DJ Synchro, underneath]
We have a rule here where is if it can be mended in 15 minutes or less and it’s a high-value item that we know will sell, we’ll take the time and mend it.
6:45 Those repairs are things like mending small holes or removing stains. They’ll take the time if they are confident they can resell it, keeping a good piece in circulation. Things that are in relatively good shape but are unlikely to sell get donated to area nonprofits.From that sorting area, we moved into another section of the building that is basically a huge closet, with clothing hung in three stacked tiers.
[Music fades out]
Cynthia: We’re standing in our inventory where we have all these perfectly good, gently worn Eileen Fisher pieces. We have about 20,000 pieces hanging in here, same in Seattle. This is where our warehouse team comes and pulls for whichever store is selling. They have to pull 450 garments a month for the Soho store so they’re looking for what will make a nice assortment and complement the mainline, full-price product in that store.
Maddy: There is something to me very reassuring seeing these quantities on the one hand, to see how much comes back but it doesn’t feel like drowning in stuff. It looks reasonable.
Cynthia: We do feel a lot like we’re drowning in product. Right now we don’t keep everything clean and hanging. We clean as we need it.
Maddy: We’ve shifted into a more industrial space. Where are we now?
Cynthia: We’re in our inventory stockpile section. We have these green and yellow bags full of clothing.
[Music, Moonlight by DJ Synchro, underneath]
8:15 On metal shelving from the floor to the ceiling, yellow and green drawstring laundry bags are full of gently-used Eileen Fisher clothing.
[Music fades out]
Cynthia: We have about 55,000 units in these rows. These are first-quality clothes we’ve sorted. We’ve said, when we’re ready for them, we’ll clean them and hang them in our warehouse. Every bag has a tag. This one says June 6, 2019, tops, number is 60 tops. Every bag says what’s in it. We need sweaters for fall, we come in and pull everything that we need, send it out to be dry cleaned or laundered, and then add it to our hanging inventory.
[Music, Moonlight by DJ Synchro, underneath]
8:53 More rows of shelves appear, these filled with clear plastic bags. Inside is clothing bundled by fabric and color. And in this area there is some kind of air ventilation system that is quite loud.
[Music fades out]
9:10 Cynthia: Do you feel more overwhelmed by the product? [laughs]
Maddy: Yes, yeah. [laughs]It’s nicely organized, that helps manage what might otherwise be a feeling of mounting panic. Yeah, there really is a lot. Wow, that’s a lot.
Cynthia: This is all the damaged product that we cannot sell. This is actually a great deal more than 55,000, I don’t know the exact number, but it’s over 100,000.
Maddy: That you cannot sell it as is?
Cynthia: Yeah. We have to organize our damaged inventory differently than our sellable inventory.
[Music, Moonlight by DJ Synchro, underneath]
9:40 We move on to another area with worktables and rolling bins full of clothes. This is where they sort damaged clothing.
[Music fades out]
Cynthia: Everything that is damaged gets laundered and sent through to be sorted again. It gets sorted by fiber, by color, by style like top or bottom. You can see here we have a big pile of vaguely green sweaters. So these all need to be separated into specific colorways and put properly, 20 each, in a bag. We start with big bins that are just by fabric. This is a linen bin; this is a blend bin, wool bin, silk bin.
[Music, Moonlight by DJ Synchro, underneath]
It’s with the damaged items that the team gets creative.
[Music fades out]
There’s a mending conversation that’s around visual mending, an artisanal, hand-mended approach. Carmen Gama who is our Re-Sewn designer, she works here, looking at inventory in terms of damages that we can’t resell and how to design into them and make new clothes out of old clothes. You have the opportunity to do more volume and have something that doesn’t look patchwork-y as you might expect re-made clothes to look. This is a jumpsuit that’s made out of seven pairs of jeans. All the design work happens here and we’re producing them in a factory in New York. The other thing, we’re doing a lot of R&D and starting to sell felted fabric, fabric that has been industrially needle-punch felted. Certain fabric combinations work well with this technique. You needle-punch them together and get this thick, beautiful soft fabric. We’re making pillows, vessels, boxy things, purses. We’re really excited about the potential of this technology to help us go through damaged we can’t sell.
Maddy: Where do these items get sold?
Cynthia: Many of our Eileen Fisher full-price stores. Waste No More, that’s the name of this project. The idea is they are reusing everything damaged and that cannot be sold.
11:40 The goal of Renew is to keep clothing wearable as long as possible. Other projects include using indigo dye on white linen pieces which renders stains invisible. And Cynthia is excited to scale the Resewn collections as her colleague, Carmen, develops patterns for these new styles that use fabric from damaged or unsellable items. We toured a bit more of the Tiny Factory, looking at samples of felted wall hangings and a collection of returned sweaters that are so shrunken they look like baby clothes. Then we settled into a spare room to continue our conversation without the background noise of the factory floor.
Maddy: Eileen Fisher clothes go out into the world and then you lose track of them unless they come back. Do you have a sense of either how much you’d like to be taking back, or could, and what the limits are of how much you could take back?
Cynthia: I would love to see the program double and double again. I think that the Renew program could be a small but significant part of the company’s bottom line. I would love to see us taking back a million pieces a year in the future. We want our customers to buy Eileen Fisher clothes and wear them as long as possible, and give them to their daughters or their friends. We don’t want to see coming back quickly. We want them in closets and being worn for a long time.
Maddy: Can you talk about the margins for this part of the business?
Cynthia: We pay $5 for each piece and then we clean everything. Whether it’s dry cleaned or laundered, there’s a different cost associated. Really, our Cost of Goods are the rent for our warehouses, and the staff in our warehouses, and the cost of cleaning everything. Last year, we did about $4 million in sales of just resale product. That part of the business is profitable. I think about it more holistically. We’re cleaning everything, and we’re storing everything, and if only 55% of it is sellable -- and you have to look at are you selling everything that’s sellable, which the answer right now is no -- if you’re holding everything that is sellable and holding everything that is damaged and doing the R&D, if you put it all together as one program, your costs are quite high.
13:50 Maddy: How do you decide how to price things for Renew?
Cynthia: We price about a quarter to a third of what it would be if it was new. It’s more of a perceived value. A new cashmere sweater would be $300 to $400, so we sell from 95 to 120.
Maddy: Is circularity, is that a term that is meaningful within Eileen Fisher?
Cynthia: It is meaningful inside the company. There are still a million questions about what does circular truly mean for us. The way we talk about it is how can we have a fully circular product? Meaning, how are we designing at the beginning? We’re taking it back, we’re reselling, and what we can’t resell, how are we reusing and recycling it? Ultimately, we want to be feeding it back into mainline or making into new beautiful products. How do we create a true closed loop for ourselves with our product from when we first make it to when we get it back, and then, can you feed it back into the first mainline production, which we are starting to do.
Maddy: So the closed loop element of that is not just making sure that fabrics get recycled but that you will make use of new fabric that results. You’re really taking responsibility for the continual use of these—
15:15 Cynthia: Yes. We’re in a unique position because of the high-quality fabric and fiber that we use. I believe it makes sense to at least try to go down this path of creating a feedstock for ourselves. Textile recycling, whatever is happening now is a fraction of what we’re going to see in the future. And so my hope is also that we’re getting ahead of the curve of what’s possible, what can we use, what we can’t use — we think there’s also a nice market opportunity in terms of selling product with recycled content and speaking to customers who actually really care about that. On our full-price line, we sell recycled cashmere that is not our recycled cashmere but we’re also looking into selling things made of our own clothes, which I‘m very proud of.
Maddy: Things are broken down back to the fiber state and then turned into yarn again, is that right?
Cynthia: That’s right. The only thing I would add is that there is mechanical recycling and chemical recycling. Mechanical is really breaking things down. If you imagine a machine tearing clothing apart and that’s what’s predominant now, tearing our clothes and shredding and combining them with virgin cotton fiber and re-spinning new thread or yarn. Chemical recycling is where the innovation will be coming. Imagine a bath of chemicals. I’m oversimplifying. The clothes, they go in there and the chemicals pull it apart to create fibers again that then get re-spun. That’s where I think the innovation will be coming in the years to come.
Maddy: Can you speak to what the problem is with blends if the consideration is not just longevity of the original item but being able to recycle the fabric?
17:00 Cynthia: Yeah. When you start blending natural and synthetic, and spandex especially, spandex acts like gum in any of the machinery that is recycling, like mechanical recycling. Spandex gets in all the gears and gums things up, so they won’t take higher than 5% or 8% spandex content. In terms of blends, if you can’t pull everything apart, then you can’t reuse it. It becomes industrial fluff where you can make moving blankets or insulation, but that’s not really keeping it at its highest value. Anything with 100% same content is inherently pretty reusable as far as I can tell. 100% poly, you can recycle it. 100% wool, cotton, cashmere, linen, all of those, we have established avenues of recycling. But when they start getting blended, that’s when it gets complicated. There is a lot of money being thrown at this problem right now, which is good, and hopefully it won’t be such a problem in the future, but for now they’re not recyclable. I heard that there’s a term, monstrous blends, or something like that. It’s for these blends that are all these different fabrics — spandex and nylon and poly and cotton -- and it’s kind of impossible to take back apart. It’s a really troubling practice but I hope designers will start to back away from.
Maddy: Are you doing recycling through Renew?
Cynthia: Yes.
Maddy: Can that happen here, the Tiny Factory? Do you have that capacity?
Cynthia: No, that’s an industrial process. We are working with the New Denim Project, based in Guatemala, I believe. They do recycled cotton fabric and products. We’re sending them 2,000 pounds of our cotton t-shirts, damaged cotton t-shirts, and they’re blending it with virgin cotton and we’re making a fabric that will be 50% virgin cotton and 50% recycled Eileen Fisher cotton that will then be created for our mainline.
Maddy: Then volume becomes an asset: 2,000 pounds at a time, an upside to volume. Sometimes more is what actually enables you to do something with it.
Cynthia: It’s a really tricky balance.
19:20 Maddy: I’m curious about how the Renew program is influencing design of the mainline. It sounds like there is a lot of data coming back. It must be like a laboratory. You get something back and look at it and it’s not doing what you thought it would over time.
Cynthia: The way we approach a lot of things as a company is jump in and do something because whatever reasoning, it makes sense, let’s try it. Then we get to a place where we’re like, oh, ok, this is good, let’s put a strategy around it. Renew isn’t going anywhere, it’s a great part of the company, how do we more formally link it to our manufacturing process and design process and we’re starting to have those conversations now. How would we embed the idea of circularity into our mainline design process more formally? Or how do we talk about material selection? There is work we need to do in this area. When we get back the same t-shirt and they all, the hem is breaking in the same place, that’s really valuable information for manufacturing. Or if we get back the same style of something, maybe that wasn’t quite right for our line if people are returning en masse. Or on the flip side, we get things back that are 25 years old and the fabric still looks amazing.
Maddy: We all end up with clothes that we want to get rid of. Things that are still in ok shape. They’re discolored, you don’t like the fit anymore, you love it but you never wear it. I think it can be hard to figure out what to do with clothes when you want to get rid of them. There’s the hand-me-down option within your existing circle. There’s consignment, some things still hold their value. If it’s Eileen Fisher I can bring back to Eileen Fisher, but most brands don’t take their stuff back, they have no infrastructure to take it back. I get stumped sometimes. Seems to me the bottom line is we don’t want things going to landfill.
21:18 Cynthia: You’re asking a really big, difficult question. It’s something like 85% of discarded clothes end up in landfill. I agree with you, that’s the thing we’re trying to avoid. Just don’t throw your clothes away. I know a lot of textile recyclers will take weird things, like socks and underwear. If things are soiled and really dirty they do get thrown away. My understanding is if it’s an old pair of socks, they get chopped up and turned into insulation, or rags. To me, that’s a better use than landfill. My understanding of how it works is, say you donate to one of the big name donation places like a Salvation Army or Goodwill. They keep about 10%, or a small percentage of what is donated to sell in their stores. Most of everything that is donated ends up in textile recyclers. It’s a gigantic warehouse where they are processing tens of thousands of garments every day. Basically, they’re sorting the clothes at much more complex level than what we do. They’re sorting and selling, clothing is a commodity. They are baling it and selling oversees markets or some in the US or to insulation companies who are turning into moving blankets or car-seat insulation, insulation.
Maddy: Very few companies are doing what Eileen Fisher is doing in this regard. It seems like more companies are starting to try to figure it out. I come here and this seems doable. Is there a vision for what you’d like to see the rest of the industry do in this regard?
23:05 Cynthia: We would love to see more brands take their own clothing back. And we’re always really excited to share what we do. We have an open and standing invitation for anybody to come see our factory or talk with us about trying to start something like this. Different brands could do this in different ways. As natural resources get more expensive, larger companies will be more interested in the potential of not only resale as another revenue stream but also of recycling to help feed their production.
Maddy: How has your work with Renew influenced your paradigm, how you see the world, your relationship to clothes?
Cynthia: I think it’s more like working for a program like this makes me feel there is so much more that we need to be doing.
[Music up and under, Wonder by EJ Cali]
[CLOSING TIPS]
23:54 There is so much more that we need to be doing. As usual, I encourage you to take actions of your own that relate to the topic of today’s episode. So, here’s your new assignment! Take stock of how you dispose of clothes you don’t want or need or can’t use anymore. First, think back to any clothes you got rid of in the past year. How did you dispose of them? Be honest, please. Don’t omit that pair of raggedy socks you put into your garbage bin. Ok, once you’ve refreshed your memory, here’s the question: the next time you do a wardrobe cleanout, how could you dispose of things to keep them in circulation at their highest value?
Here are options to consider depending on what you have:
First, for clothing that has plenty of life left in it: Do you have friends or relatives who might be interested in some of your cast-offs? Where is the nearest second-hand consignment shop? Do you have accounts on eBay, ThredUp, or The Real Real?
For things that are more worn out but still wearable, where is the nearest community thrift store, or Salvation Army or Goodwill?
For items that are damaged but otherwise in good shape, does the brand offer repairs? Could a tailor do the repair for a reasonable amount of money? Could you fix it yourself with the guidance of an online video?
For those items that are hardest to get to a new home, the stained, worn out, raggedy items, go to our website – The Relentless [dot] Org -- for tips on finding places to drop those off so they can be turned into things like insulation and rags.
This activity is another opportunity to take stock of the fabrics that you tend to purchase. Check labels for blends and try to avoid them in the future, especially for items that are likely to wear out over time.
For more about Eileen Fisher circularity, check out Eileen Fisher Renew [dot] com and Waste No More [dot] com. Links to these sites are on our website where we’ve also uploaded information about repairing and recycling clothes, other brands that have Take Back and Repair programs, and other resources related to reusing and recycling clothes.
[CREDITS]
[Music, Look At the Stars by DJ Synchro, under to end]
25:55 Relentless is produced by me, Maddy Russell-Shapiro.
Music for Relentless is provided by Building Beats, an awesome nonprofit that teaches young people in New York City’s schools how to DJ and make music. Today’s music was produced by EJ Cali and DJ Synchro. If you like the music, please consider supporting Building Beats!
Everything you need to know about the show and this series is available on our website, The Relentless [dot] orgSubscribe through your podcast listening app so new episodes will download automatically.
And come back for the next episode!