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Last year, London-based repair pioneer The Restory, offering “aftercare for fashion”, entered a shock liquidation after a merger went awry. Now, its founders are back with a software solution that claims to — finally — make repair accessible and scalable.
Launching today, Circulo is a white-label software for businesses engaged in repair — ranging from fashion brands and retailers to repair specialists. While repair businesses have previously relied on paper tickets and labour-intensive management systems, Circulo promises to streamline the process, automating price quotes and invoices, customer communication, workflow management and operations.
Rental, resale and repair have risen to the mainstream by claiming to be better for the environment than linear fashion models, but attempts to quantify their impact have been criticised. Experts say better data is needed.
In many ways, this is an answer to The Restory’s struggles. By the time it closed in 2023, The Restory had 10 enterprise partners, including Selfridges, Farfetch and Browns, each accepting repair requests through its own website or retail stores, as well as The Restory’s direct site. The company had its own internal repair team, alongside its external partners (many of whom still used paper tickets to manage workflow), and it took orders across every possible category, product, material, condition and brand.
“Repair is such a complex service and The Restory was as complicated as it gets,” says co-founder and chief commercial officer Emily Rea. “That gave us a foundational knowledge, which we’ve spent the last year developing into a licensable software solution for businesses to use as it suits them.” Rea is joined in the new venture by her co-founder Vanessa Jacobs, as well as The Restory’s former head of product and delivery Vipaasha Sheel and serial software solutions executive Karm Khanna. “We want to be for repair what Shopify is for e-commerce and Salesforce is for customer relationship management (CRM).”
Whether Circulo can deliver on its promises — and whether the industry is ready to let it try — is up for debate. “Many of the retailers and brands that we work with really value the management element of our partnership, including quality control, customer relations and maker management,” says Layla Sargent, founder and CEO of The Seam, which provides end-to-end repairs for Net-a-Porter among others. “That takes up so much time, and you have to manage expectations on all sides to even say whether a repair is possible and what it will cost.”
The repair market has developed rapidly since The Restory debuted in 2017, but it still faces systemic and cultural challenges. Despite legislative pressure for brands and retailers to offer repair, many are stuck in the pilot phase, with limited will and budget to scale their services. Meanwhile, consumer engagement remains low compared to other circular business models.
Stuck in the pilot phase
In 2021, the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) published two pieces of consumer research. One audited almost 45,000 items of clothing in the UK to understand longevity across demographics, acquisition routes and in-use behaviours. The other explored consumer behaviour and engagement with circularity. “Among the 45,000 items of clothing, we found that 22 per cent had reportedly been repaired, either by the owner or a third party, and 57 per cent of citizens said they were likely to use a repair service,” explains Sarah Robins, associate specialist in fashion and textiles.
WRAP’s scenario modelling showed that repair could reduce the carbon footprint of each clothing product by 6 per cent, and its water footprint by 8 per cent, matching resale. The average repair could extend the lifespan of a garment by 1.3 years.
However, repair had the lowest recognition out of all circular services posed to respondents (the list included subscription, rental, pre-loved, upcycling and repair). Robins attributes this to the challenges in scaling repair — it is notoriously costly and difficult, and represents a barrier to new sales. “We see a big opportunity for brands and retailers to invest in repair.”
In April, London-based fashion-tech platform Sojo, which provides repairs for brands and retailers like Ganni and Selfridges, launched ‘Pledge to Repair’. The initiative calls on the fashion industry to commit to scaling care and repair services, borne out of founder and CEO Josephine Philips’s disillusionment with such services being confined to pilot stages. “We wanted to form a coalition of industry professionals, citizens and brands that care about this, potentially gathering insights and data, and ultimately being able to push for legislative change,” Philips explains.
The barriers to scale are many. London repair shop Pinnas and Needles, providing repair services to brands including Stone Island, Moncler and Belstaff, uses a painstakingly analogue system. Co-founder Pio Pinna notes customer details and repair instructions on a piece of paper, then passes this on to the seamstresses and tailors, who often phone him back to confirm his handwriting. One day a month, Pinna manually inputs all of this information into a basic spreadsheet to generate an invoice for brand partners.
Via Circulo, this process will be digitised and automated. “To build that system from scratch would cost us several thousand pounds and it would need updating constantly,” says Pinna.
For British lifestyle brand Toast, which has completed 5,800 free repairs since 2019 and considers repair as part of its retail-store operational costs, the biggest barrier to scale is the need for hands-on customer service. “In-person consultations are crucial to manage customer expectations,” says CEO Suzie de Rohan Willner. “Especially if the item is 20 years old, it’s very emotional. You have to get it right.”
Hasna Kourda, founder and CEO of LVMH-backed repair startup Save Your Wardrobe, says the problem is more insidious. “The current system is built on applying pressure at all costs: pressuring supply chains at the expense of suppliers and garment workers, and pressuring post-purchase value chains at the expense of people and the environment. We decline partnerships that would put undue pressure on us. If brands want the solution for free, we say no, because we know their team won’t be committed.”
Shifting the culture around repair
Designer Patrick McDowell used secondhand shoes repaired by The Restory in their SS23 runway, and is now being onboarded by Circulo. They say repair is a key lever in building stronger customer relationships, and part of a bigger shift away from linear production and consumption, towards made-to-order, personalised and circular fashion.
“If the consumer’s mindset is changing to one of individualism and experience, and buying more interesting pieces, it makes sense they would be interested in repairing and keeping them, but also that the repair makes it more theirs,” says McDowell. “There is a real creative opportunity with repair that’s being missed, where your designer brain can do something really special. If we were reselling a creatively repaired item, maybe we would list it as ‘Patrick McDowell repaired by X’ to recognise that craft.”
The trend towards creative or visible mending is small but growing. Toast says about 40 per cent of its repairs are visible, and its recent Toast Renewed collection has been a hit with customers, achieving 80 per cent sell-through. For some, this is a sign that the values and aspirations underpinning the fashion system are shifting. “If the obsession with novelty and creating an item that looks like it has never been worn is the aspiration, then repair will struggle to meet those expectations,” says Royal Danish Academy and OsloMet professor Kate Fletcher, whose 2016 book Craft of Use: Post-Growth Fashion explores the ways we care for clothing after the point of purchase.
But visible repairs also show how far the industry has to go, figuring out its place in a broader circular fashion system. “There is a view among luxury brands that visible or creative repairs change the design of a garment, and they are not OK with that; they say it’s not original or authentic,” says The Restory’s Rea. “It links to the resale value of a garment too. Resale businesses have their own risks around authenticating luxury goods. Especially with mounting concerns around counterfeit goods, will repaired items with visible alterations still pass authenticity tests?”
Sojo is about to launch its partnership with Vestiaire Collective. Philips says much of the conversation has been around the link between repair and resale, and what changes Sojo can make to a garment without jeopardising resale value or authenticity. Partnerships with brands are crucial to making this work, she explains. “When you replace a Ganni button with another Ganni button because they have given you the spare parts to be able to offer that repair, you can maintain the integrity of the piece.”
What is the end goal for repair?
The push to repair is partly coming from legislators. Asked which policy levers could help make market conditions more favourable for repair providers, Natasha David, programme manager of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s fashion initiative, points to extended producer responsibility (EPR) and the French repair fund, whereby the French government will contribute €154 million in over five years to offer repair subsidies to consumers. Going beyond current measures, she suggests shifting taxes from labour to the use of finite virgin resources. “The system is currently optimised to create new products, which we want to move away from. Tax reforms could include reducing the VAT on circular services, which is difficult but could be a key unlock. Also, providing transitional funding for startups in this space.”
For Fletcher, repair without degrowth (or at least reducing product volumes) is an exercise in greenwashing, and the two need to be handled simultaneously in policy. “Paying a lot of attention to repairs as part of a bigger strategy to sell more stuff is deeply problematic. If we’re repairing pieces to keep them going, we don’t need additional pieces at the same time,” she says. “The idea of repair and durability only works in a system of scarcity. But in the context of abundance and overproduction, repair doesn’t begin to reduce the overarching impacts we’re facing. Repair only makes an environmental difference when we have a reduction in production volumes.”
Alongside the commercial push for repairs, there should be a citizen-led education campaign, she continues. “The fact that it often costs more to repair an item than to replace it entirely shows that we are at peak convenience culture. Some of the things we can do to solve this are: teach repair skills in schools, giving people a chance to develop these skills in low-stake environments, and continue to build the skills over time.”
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