Reflaunt: enables fashion brands’ and retailers’ customers to easily resell or recycle their past purchases directly on the brands’ individual e-commerce platforms. | Knowledge Hub | Circle Economy Foundation
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Business case
Reflaunt: enables fashion brands’ and retailers’ customers to easily resell or recycle their past purchases directly on the brands’ individual e-commerce platforms.
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Founded in 2019, Reflaunt is a Resale-as-a-Service (RaaS) technology company empowering global fashion brands to embrace circularity. Reflaunt offers a proposition that enables fashion brands’ and retailers’ customers to easily resell or recycle their past purchases directly on the brands’ individual e-commerce platforms. The items are then offered for sale on more than 20 marketplaces across North America, Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Australia, reaching over 30 million secondhand buyers worldwide. The technology enables fashion brands to increase sales and customer retention rates, while accessing data on resale performance of their own products. In turn, marketplaces in Reflaunt’s network gain access to a large assortment of high-quality products sourced directly from the brands, allowing for purchase traceability, which mitigates counterfeit risk.

Problem

The rapid purchase-to-discard ratio of fast fashion and piling up of clothing in landfills, often made from synthetic materials which do not decompose easily. When consumers throw away clothing in the garbage, not only does it waste money and resources, but it can take 200+ years for the materials to decompose in a landfill. During the decomposition process, textiles generate greenhouse methane gas and leach toxic chemicals and dyes into the groundwater and our soil. There is also the unmet potential of clothing which could be resold, and its lifetime extended- as opposed to manufacturing new clothing which requires more energy and water use, and is associated with more carbon emissions. Finally, there are lack of incentives for people to responsibly pass on/resell their unwanted clothing due to the associated costs- be that time or monetary (e.g. shipping).

Solution

Reflaunt addresses these problems through providing an easy way to redirect unwanted clothing and thus divert it from landfills. It also provides a second-hand marketplace thus encouraging buying second hand and diverting ‘new new’ purchases, thus hopefully slowing down resource depletion.

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