Lessons from Eileen Fisher’s newest circular collection
Focus and flexibility are just two of the requirements to build "Mended" garments into a worthwhile business. Read More
Moth holes and merlot stains usually send shirts to the trash, but these imperfections are leading to new creations at Eileen Fisher. The company’s Mended collection of blatantly repaired, patched or merged clothes is launching March 27, selling new white linen shirts concocted from pre-worn ones.
These and other Mended items — which will only be produced by the tens and sold online — will make up a small fragment of Eileen Fisher’s robust repair and recycling efforts. But they are part of the company’s grander ambitions: to reduce its footprint, inspire change in the industry, cater to customer preferences and continue to set the pace in this burgeoning sector.
“The work that we do is leading the way for other brands to follow us,” said Carmen Gama, Eileen Fisher’s director of circular design. “Right now, it does not contribute to the bottom line but we’re building customer loyalty.”
Another benefit, Gama explained, is that because Eileen Fisher handles so many products after use, it enjoys a competitive advantage over other companies scrambling to satisfy California’s new extended producer responsibility (EPR) law, which requires brands to manage worn apparel.
Setting a slower pace
“In Eileen Fisher’s case, repair is a signal that its clothing is worthwhile, well made and timeless,” said Ken Pucker, an advocate for sustainable fashion and former Timberland executive who teaches business at Dartmouth and Tufts universities. “It is a throwback to how clothing used to be worn and reworn.”
Eileen Fisher’s concept of “a simple wardrobe” generally seeks to encourage consumers to buy a small number of long-lasting items and to influence other businesses to slow their pace of material waste. The privately held B Corporation doesn’t share sales figures but has withstood the winds of fast fashion for 41 years by espousing circular economy concepts. Three years ago, the Eileen Fisher Foundation issued a 135-page, anti-waste playbook for the industry.
The Irvington, New York, company hopes to popularize creative reuse, repair and deconstruction of clothes, just as it was a pioneer in branded resale. Eileen Fisher was among the few brands offering consumer takeback and resale in 2009, Gama noted. The effort, later called Renew, expanded nationally in 2013. With branded resale normalizing, Eileen Fisher began exploring how to manage unsellable inventory, according to Gama. She joined the brand a decade ago to oversee managing damaged takeback items, from design to production. Her approaches included mending, over-dyeing and remanufacturing “special collections.”
Last year, the company took back 300,000 items, up nearly 10 percent from two years earlier. From 2009 to 2023, the Renew program collected more than 2 million units of apparel and re-sold 660,885 of them. Taken-back goods also wind up warehoused, donated, repurposed or downcycled into shoddy fibers for auto carpets or seating. In addition, Eileen Fisher works with partners Re-Verso in Italy and Hallotex in Spain to create fiber-to-fiber recycled sweaters.
The Mended collections
The Mended collections focus on garments that can’t be fixed or laundered but are otherwise serviceable. Most garment repairs strive to restore to “good as new” condition, which Eileen Fisher also does for customers. By contrast, the Mended approach draws attention to the former flaws with visual mending, such as paneling or patchwork. It echoes the wabi-sabi concept in Japan of finding beauty in flaws.
The clothes can be made whole again, but there is such a thing as too many moth holes. “The team really does try their best to cover them all,” Gama said. “They try to match the exact same color of the sweater, and that’s why sometimes these things take a lot of time.”
For upcoming Mended collections, Eileen Fisher will make about 75 white linen shirts in March, followed by 120 dyed linen shirts in May. It’s overdyeing shirts for April, with partner Botanical Colors of Seattle, to hide stains. October will feature outerwear and November will see a cashmere sweater. “These collections are very small right now, but if we see a lot of interest from our customers, we can start scaling volume,” Gama said.
Eileen Fisher’s latest creation is merging two linen shirts into one. “For these white shirts, we are grabbing one that is very damaged, and then just cutting some of those panels and adding them to the next one,” Gama said. “They’re very simple and elevated. And actually, you can’t tell that this is a repaired garment. It looks new by itself.”
A unique appeal, and costs
Most businesses that make mending and reconstruction a feature, rather than a bug, do so on an even smaller scale, such as Eva Joan in Brooklyn or Suay in Los Angeles. The Welsh brand Toast offers a visual repair program. One corporate example is The North Face, which sells Remade puffer jackets that mix the non-matching sleeves and bodices of used jackets.
“I see so many people looking for customized, one-of-a-kind items, especially younger kids, teenagers,” said Cynthia Power, a consultant to apparel companies who worked for more than a decade at Eileen Fisher. “When you combine a quality item with a beautiful, visual mend, you all of a sudden have an incredibly high quality item that no other person has. That’s an incredible feeling and experience.”
Sometimes fixing one garment takes an entire day, which adds costs, Gama added. “It does take a lot of resources to do that, but it’s part of our value to offer these types of services to our customers, because we really want to tell the story that we are here to try to extend the life cycle of this garment as much as we can,” she said.
Making items last as long as possible has real environmental consequences. For example, a single cotton shirt may require hundreds of gallons of water to make. Repairing a T-shirt instead of buying one new saves about 17 pounds of CO2, roughly equivalent to driving a gas-powered car for 20 miles, according to a February report by the nonprofit Waste and Resources Action Program (WRAP).
Takeaways
Gama shared tips for other apparel companies interesting in reducing their footprints with circular-economy programs:
- Set priorities. “Circularity can be completely overwhelming,” she said. Therefore, Gama advised, it’s important to pick a focus, such as materials or handling at the end of life. “Because if you are an established brand it’s not easy to just switch and become circular. It’s baby steps.”
- Be open and flexible. “We’ve been able to streamline a lot of these operations because we’re constantly talking to new innovators and service providers,” she said. “And if we find that it doesn’t work to do something outside we bring it back in house.”
- Consider end of life at the beginning. “The more we know about the end of life solutions, the better it can inform the designers, so by the time that garment comes back to us it’s already kind of thought through.”
