Take-Back-as-a-Service

Jul 23

July 3, 2024

Today’s newsletter is a heads up on one element of the circular economy, especially related to fashion: take-back as a service is heating up! I’ve been watching this service offering develop over a few years, and now there are increasingly sophisticated players offering these services and competing against each other to win business… so I think it’s in a category of its own. I work with vendors in this space, and I have strong opinions- so I’m just giving a high level overview today.

When I say take-back, I mean two things:

taking back anything unsellable from brands including unsold, returned, and damaged merchandise - usually I categorize this as ‘pre-consumer’ meaning it hasn’t been used by a customer (or maybe just briefly if it’s a return)
taking back used items from consumers- usually called ‘post-consumer’

This industry has been heating up, and I would say with the arrival of Trashie take-back bags in the recent months, the take-back industry has hit a new level of awareness. There are many companies offering different levels of take back services including:

Bleckmann
Debrand
Helpsy
Homeboy Threads
Looper
Return to Vendor
Super Circle
Tersus
Trashie
WM
Individual sorters who can also offer services, although diligence is very important
+ more

All of these vendors offer different value propositions and specialized services related to take-back.

Things to be aware of if you’re looking for a take-back vendor:

The amount and type of data they provide is highly variable
The degree of transparency is also highly variable (what they do with it, who it ends up with and where they are, how much is reused, recycled, downcyled, burned or landfilled, etc)
It is hard to know what standards are because there aren’t any (a known gap)

My advice is: Trust people who have a lot of experience in this world of collection and sorting. Go visit their facility if you can. Try to understand the end customer of your vendor. Do some reading to understand how the industry works and what you want to happen to your product. Here are some of my related newsletters:

The main questions to get clear on are:

Are you open to your product being resold in the global second hand market? (This is usually the most sustainable choice.)
Or, do you require that your product is destroyed so it can’t be reused?
If it’s going to leave the country it’s collected in, will it be sorted in the country it is collected in before it’s exported? Unsorted exports can be problematic for the countries that receive them.

Parallel to Resale Industry

I see many parallels to the growth of the resale-as-a-service industry. Resale vendors have multiplied since 2017 when online branded resale was first introduced. In 2017, I was working at EILEEN FISHER Renew, and we launched online recommerce with Trove, the only resale-as-a-service provider. (Back then it was “Yerdle”.) Seven years later there are ….. 15+

Most of the companies have differentiated themselves; they offer different services and brands have to do homework to figure out whose services fit their needs best, and who has the right price. (I can help with that if you’re trying to decide!)

We are starting to see the same with take-back: a growing number of service providers with differentiated specialities. It is up to the brands to do their homework (this is a must and cannot be skipped) to find a good partner. This is one of the ways I work- to help brands understand the landscape and find vendors to match a brand’s requirements. Let me know if you need help in this area.

Otherwise, I hope this has been helpful context!

Practical Circularity Small Business Coalition

Please check out the coalition we are planning for this Fall focused on providing practical circular business model learnings for regional and smaller businesses from different industries. If you consider yourself a small business and are practicing circularity or want to, please have a look- and share with others who might be interested!