Costly, time-consuming and a sales barrier: Why fashion hates repairs

To become a Vogue Business Member and receive the Sustainability Edit newsletter, click here. Fashion has a repairs problem and it’s not for lack of know-how. Clothes are rarely repaired despite the increase in resale and takeback programmes. Repairing clothing is costly, time-consuming and can be logistically difficult to do at scale. Critics argue brands have little incentive to offer repairs because it’s more in their interest to sell new things rather than repair old ones. It is also a fundamentally different business to run: consumers often have unrealistic expectations about what a repair will look like or how long it will take to complete, while the labour involved is more intensive because, by definition, repairs are garment-specific and cannot mimic the efficiency of manufacturing new garments. However, to meet sustainability goals, fashion needs to figure out a way to tackle these issues and scale the capacity and the financial viability of what it can and will repair — and it needs to happen across all markets and price tiers. Clothing repair also needs to be encouraged and incentivised by brands, retailers and resale platforms to help with the necessary shift in consumer mindset. “There is no circular movement without care and repair,” says Emily Rea, co-founder and head of marketing and business development at luxury aftercare specialists The Restory, which has partnerships with Farfetch and Selfridges among others. “I think it hasn’t had the same spotlight as rental and resale, because it fundamentally wasn’t new. But actually, aftercare and repair is crucial to even unlock rental and resale. You can’t keep renting something without cleaning it or if a button comes off, repairing it.” In the conversation about sustainable fashion, repair is necessary to keep products in use longer, to keep mostly-intact clothing from being wasted and to reduce the need for purchases of replacement garments. Luxury brands pride themselves on the quality and durability of their products, and most have offered some level of product repair since their founding, though often with little promotion. Now, luxury brands including Burberry, Louis Vuitton and Gucci are expanding their capacity to offer repairs, as are resale platforms such as The RealReal and Hardly Ever Worn It (Hewi). Companies operating in other price tiers, such as The Renewal Workshop and California-based Suay, are also expanding rapidly. These are all positive signs, because the industry’s sustainability efforts — and the potential of resale and textile recycling to reduce fashion’s footprint — can’t deliver their full potential unless the industry also embraces clothing repair. Less than half of garments collected through takeback programmes are ready for resale, according to an assessment of thousands of garments from brands across the fashion spectrum, conducted by The Renewal Workshop; adding the capacity to renew or fix a garment increases that number from 46 per cent to 82 per cent, it found. “Reuse and remade and repair only works if it's available and accessible to everyone,” says Lindsay Rose Medoff, CEO and lead designer at Suay, a Los Angeles-based upcycling company. “It's what the consumer is starting to ask for and on top of the consumer, the planet is really asking for it. We are on the verge of running out of clean water and clean air, and this is something that we have to do — start using our textiles that already exist.” Luxury shows signs of expanding its repair culture While luxury has long offered product repair, those services have been limited in range, says The Restory’s Rea. They may fix damages covered by a warranty, for example, but not typical wear-and-tear needs, such as cleaning, colour restoration and resoling. “That’s very much seen as a customer’s responsibility. I think the customer has had frustration of not knowing where to go,” she says. That’s the gap she says The Restory has been trying to fill, and the company’s growth shows the demand is there. The company has doubled every year since it launched in 2017, this year adding Manolo Blahnik, Nicholas Kirkwood and retailers Brown Thomas and Arnotts to its list of existing partners such as Farfetch, Harrods and Selfridges. Repair is growing internally at luxury companies as well, from Burberry to LVMH, as a component of their long-term sustainability strategies. LVMH says it will announce new services by 2023 “to enhance or develop reparability” of products, with efforts underway at Louis Vuitton to develop and implement long-lasting design, a company strategy at Berluti to produce shoes that can be “completely refurbished, whatever their age”, and Fendi inviting clients to bring back furs in any condition for refurbishing or upcycling into new products. Kering committed to expanding and enabling easier access to repair services as part of its circularity strategy released in May 2021. Demand at its Shanghai specialist repair hub is growing — it repaired 20,000 items in 2020 and the number is climbing — and the company is in discussions with a university to create an apprenticeship that could help train craftspeople with the appropriate skills. The list of other brands offering repairs is growing quickly, from Barbour and Dr Martens to Christian Louboutin and Churches. Hugo Boss also plans to launch a repair service later this year, following the resale programme it launched last month. Brands are starting to see repairs as an avenue to increase consumer loyalty and engagement. There may be a larger force at work as well: the emerging understanding that instead of eating into their own sales, brands can instead use repair to keep customers in the brand’s ecosystem for longer — just as they’ve started to realise resale is an opportunity to do as well. Providing customers with better aftercare services, Rea argues, is less likely to cannibalise sales of new products — a frequent worry for companies that need to record continuous growth — but instead potentially convert new customers who may be willing to spend more on their products if they feel more confident about the purchase being worthwhile. “If you have access to trusted aftercare, it’s starting to slowly shift that mindset: instead of buying something throwaway, invest in something more long-term. If you choose not to keep it, if you have a desirable brand in good condition that has good aftercare, you can resell it, you can rent it,” she says. The growth of resale has also fuelled a need to increase capacity for repair, says Tatiana Wolter-Ferguson, CEO of luxury resale platform Hewi, which just announced a partnership with logistics provider ACS (Advanced Clothing Solutions) to expand its operations, including increasing the speed, range and efficiency of its repair offerings. “At the start, it was quite bespoke. We’d do repairs on high value pieces, because it is quite labour intensive. You wanted to make sure that the return was there for both you and the customer, the seller,” she says. “We were doing a lot of that work, but with individual partners and that's why we've moved to ACS. It gives us the ability to offer that service across all our products and to all our sellers.” Overcoming hurdles There are hurdles to overcome before the industry will be ready to embrace repair at a major scale. Products need to be designed for easier repair, says Nicole Bassett, co-founder of The Renewal Workshop. The process is time-consuming, which not only means the labour is costly but also runs up against consumer expectations for speed and convenience. “You say, ‘Great, it'll be ready for pickup in two to three weeks’, and they're like, ‘two to three weeks, what do you mean?’” says Medoff of Suay. The timeline has come down quite a bit, she says, but brands looking at expanding repair services need to be prepared for both managing customer expectations and the learning curve that will come with rolling out a service that is so different from a traditional fashion business. “It’s taken us quite a bit of work to get to the turnaround time we have, where you can pick it up in three to seven days. It took so much trial and error to figure that out.” There is also no perfect approach to repair: many products can be restored to like-new condition, but the majority of repairs will impart some level of uniqueness to the product, whether it’s a small patch or newly-visible seam or a more major overhaul such as an upcycled jacket. That will demand that repair companies have a process for deciding how to handle different types of wear or damage — and, again, that they engage with the customer about what the result will look like. “You’re dealing with the personality of the repair, and the personality of the person getting it fixed. Not everybody wants it to be fixed in the same way,” she says. These challenges are why, she says, Suay is working on a guide — to help brands navigate some of the predictable hurdles that come with repair, and to map out a plan for offering it at scale. For her, it’s also crucial that repair services expand across the industry, not just in luxury. “We’re trying to prove on a daily basis that you can repair cheap stretch denim and five-thread T-shirts,” she says. ”There’s an idea that the more expensive it is, the more repairable it is. But really, you should be able to repair a Gucci bag just like you should be able to repair a $10 pair of jeans.” Rea agrees and says that is The Restory’s goal as well, saying its platform can help to achieve that kind of scale that’s necessary. “Our end ambition is very much to power aftercare for the fashion industry, not just for luxury but to support and have brands leverage the technology and the systems that we’ve built to enable it,” she says. Scaling — and normalising, facilitating and promoting — repair industry-wide is needed not only to create impact, but experts say it’s also a necessary foundation before other services, including resale, rental and recycling, can reduce the industry’s footprint to the extent that proponents in those fields have promised. “We don't want to skip the ‘using products longer’ piece and go straight to recycling,” says Bassett. “We're conditioned to just keep buying new stuff. I think there is an awareness building [that needs to happen] and understanding of why repairing is worthwhile.” Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com. More from this author: Kering backs cow-free, lab-grown leather. Game changer? Resale sustainability: What’s real and what’s false India’s garment worker abuse worsens, report says

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