Inc. How a Supply Chain Startup Is Making Recycling in the Apparel Industry Scalable
Supercircle’s founding story was featured in Inc., with Co-Founders Chloe Songer and Stuart Ahlum detailing how they built the infrastructure to make textile recycling scalable. The piece traces the company's roots back to their footwear brand, Thousand Fell, and covers Supercircle's 4x year-over-year growth.
The question Chloe Songer always gets is, “Isn’t recycling a hoax?” Certainly, it has its challenges, as she and her co-founder, Stuart Ahlum, discovered after they launched their fully recyclable shoe brand, Thousand Fell, in 2018. With the cost of recycling each part surpassing $30 per pair, the economics just didn’t make sense. But, the duo hypothesized, they could solve for that if they put the right systems in place. Now, SuperCircle, their two-year-old circular supply chain company–which has grown 4x year-over-year–stands to make textile waste a thing of the past. -As told to Rebecca Deczynski
“In 2021, the fashion brand Reformation approached us about a footwear collab, and we realized there was a bigger opportunity. Brands had made circularity commitments, but there was no critical infrastructure to take clothing and sort it for recycling. So, we focused on building that back end, with Reformation as our first client. That became SuperCircle.”
“We had to go recycler by recycler and ask, ‘Would you take post-consumer clothing? Why won’t you take it now? What would it take for you to take it?’ Today, we work with more than 20 recyclers and more than 30 brand partners.
“We do recycling for Uniqlo North America. In a given season, it might have 40 to 50 different fabrications, which would require 16 to 17 different recyclers. Even Uniqlo can’t recycle at scale–but we can aggregate material across brands to do so.
“We have two business models. We partner with brands to create programs through which customers can recycle apparel and earn rewards. And we partner with brands to take excess and damaged inventory.
“We’ve diverted more than two million textiles from landfills to date. We’ve barely scratched the surface of what this could be.”
Read the full article here.
Image Credit: Vincent Tullo
