How Tracking Wardrobe Usage Boosts The Circular Economy

Consumers have very little idea of how their own fashion purchasing—and expanding wardrobes—are impacting the environment on a day-to-day basis. Some virtue can be had from selling the occasional item of unloved apparel on a resale app like Vinted, buying secondhand products from your local vintage store, or finding other ways of joining the circular economy. But is that enough?

While luxury brands like Gucci have tentatively entered the resale market, and mass market retailer Zara going as far as setting up its own resale platform, what this means in terms of carbon reductions is far from clear. Especially as global fashion emissions are rising.

At the first conference held by fashion technology group Reaktor in June, called Tech for Fashion, sustainability was brought under the microscope, with some valuable takeaways, applicable not just for fashion industry insiders, but for the individual consumer too.

The one-day event in Amsterdam was attended by influential names like Adidas, Highsnobiety, H&M, IKEA, PVH
PVH
, Timberland, and Zalando, but one of the most useful insights—from an individual shopper perspective—came from Reaktor’s own principal consultant for strategy and business design, Olof Hoverfält.

His inner geek led him to devise a way to track the use of every single item in his clothing collection. He established a website called the Wardrobe Diary Project, to publicize how that was going and it wasn’t long before other people joined in. Through his site, anyone can track the actual cost and environmental impact of their own clothing collections—and contribute to the data pool.

At the industry gathering, he said: “It intrigues me that we know very little about what happens in people’s homes when it comes to their apparel purchases. For some perspective, I started my own wardrobe diary about five and a half years ago.”

Hoverfält listed everything he had and started tracking—every single day—what he wore and didn’t wear and put it online so anyone could see the results. Two years ago he opened up the service and he now has a community of roughly 800 people, with 25,000 garments being actively logged. A user has to be on the site for a full year before their data is logged to take account of all seasons.

An average wardrobe has 184 items

Based on the current sample—mostly from Western countries across men and women—the average wardrobe has 184 items including socks and underwear with a value of about €8,000 ($8,740). However, there is a wide spread: some minimalist wardrobes are only 80 items and the biggest on his site has over 600 items.

The purchase price value goes from €2,500 up to €30,000 (about $2,730 to $32,770). Some of that more expensive outlier collection was purchased secondhand on the designer site Vestiaire Collective so the price (for new) would be even higher.

This is just the asset side; the ‘use’ data tells another story. “Only when a garment is worn, is it providing any value. One thing that really stood out in the data across all categories—from jackets and coats, shoes and footwear, trousers and jeans—is that roughly 35-50% of items are used in a ‘normal’ way, say five to 50 times per year,” said Hoverfält. “And about 5-10% of the clothes across categories are favorites: they are used once a week or more. That’s a very small number.”

The flip side of favorites is that some garments—up to 70%—are used four times or less in a year. “This is the harsh truth when you really start looking in detail. What this tells me is that, in general, close to half of our wardrobes are being heavily underutilized,” said the principal consultant.

Exhaustive tracking like this creates a benchmark of what is, for example, the total yearly demand in terms of actual wear in certain categories. It could offer brands some guidance as to how much to manufacture, rather than over-manufacture, to be truly sustainable.

Clothing competes for the scarce resource of simply being worn. “There are only so many days in the year and only so many opportunities for wearing a garment. So who is the loser in this game?” asked Hoverfält. Ultimately it is the environment. However, he noted that to drive down the cost per wear—and therefore minimize the environmental impact—you must ensure you wear you clothing regularly. It is less about the price of a garment than about its usage.

Cost per wear counts

Based on the Wardrobe Diary Project data, a normal range for cost per wear should be between 55 cents to $2.20 for an ‘efficient’ garment, but some go as high as $33. This is something consumers are ignorant about, because they don’t think about it, and fashion brands don’t encourage them to think about it.

“The linear model, in a way, is pushing a lot more product into the system than could ever be put into productive use,” said Hoverfält. While fashion brands do not want to see their sales fall, analysis of clothing usage can be beneficial. Surveying consumers about what they wear and how often is next to useless because they have no idea. Hoverfält’s data can therefore be beneficial in getting closer to the customer and understanding something about their habits and preferences.

From this jump-off point fashion retailers can then, more accurately, look at being part of a system of redistribution. “That could be re-commerce, reselling, second-hand, subscriptions… whatever forms it might take,” said Hoverfält.

Lotta Kopra a senior advisor in sustainability and former CCO of floated Finnish sustainable materials company Spinnova, said: “None of us really need new clothes so is it even ethically right for brands to convince us to buy that new pair of shoes? The more we think about this the trickier it gets and the more relevant this idea of redistribution becomes.”

Kopra has gone all out to rarely buy new clothes but purchases on Vinted instead. “If I want to buy something new I should at least sell two or three items from my wardrobe to someone else who can enjoy them. The more that technology facilitates this, the more brands can find ways to get involved.”

And they are doing that. On, one of the world’s fastest-growing sports shoe brands, has moved in this direction with Cyclon a circularity subscription program where the consumer doesn’t hang onto products, but sends them back every six months for a replacement. The worn-out items are then used as raw material for new products.

Benjamin Gallais, product manager lead at Switzerland-based On, commented: “If you want to do circularity you will face a lot of roadblocks and challenges. One of the first learnings was just to try out the concept, not have it perfected from the beginning. Keep it simple and try it.”

Fashion will needs to embrace circularity. Hoverfält admitted that one reason that an efficient wardrobe of say five T-shirts, two pairs of jeans, a jacket, a coat and two shoes would not work is because people want their variety, and the ability to choose. “But it does not change the fact that we are stuck with these assets, and as an industry we can help deal with that,” he said.